Acquisition of Secondary Targets During Tact and Intraverbal Instruction With Instructive Feedback

Instructive feedback is a procedure that introduces additional stimuli before or after a learning trial and can result in the acquisition of stimuli not directly taught. Further research may help us better understand the conditions under which instructive feedback is effective and preferred. In the present study, the experimenters presented intraverbal instructive feedback during tact and intraverbal teaching and compared the rate of acquisition for primary and secondary targets with a 6-year-old autistic child. The experimenters evaluated preference for learning method with a concurrent-chains procedure. Finally, the experimenters measured the frequency of echoics during teaching sessions. The tact and intraverbal conditions resulted in similar acquisition of primary and secondary targets, and the participant reported a preference for the tact condition. Further, there was initially a higher frequency of echoics to the primary target. As acquisition increased toward mastery, there were fewer echoics to the primary target and higher echoics to the secondary target. These results suggest that overt echoic behavior may facilitate the acquisition of secondary targets for some learners and demonstrate how clinicians may provide the learner with a choice of teaching strategies.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40616-025-00215-z.