Acquisition of Children's Relational Responding: The Role of the Intradimensional and Interdimensional Abstract Tact...

The acquisition of verbal behavior is complex and requires the analysis of myriad variables. Ernst Moerk estimated that by the time a child has reached 4 years of age they have experienced nearly 9 million language learning trials with mothers using at least 14 categories of maternal teaching interactions. The interactions provide a foundation for children learning the tact, mand, echoic, intraverbal, autoclitic, and other relations, described by Skinner in Verbal Behavior. Here we examine two relations that have been overlooked to some extent and arguably account for many of the generative features of verbal behavior and shared meaning: the abstract tact, or more precisely the interdimensional abstract tact, and the autoclitic frame. We describe Goldiamond's treatment of stimulus control in its many forms; dimensional, abstractional, and instructional, and how it can be used to understand the acquisition of both intradimensional and interdimensional abstract tacts and autoclitic frames that guide seemingly complex relational responding and meet consequential contingency requirements. We argue the development of complex relational responding in children can be explained parsimoniously without mediating variables or hypothetical constructs.