Sources of Stimulus Control in Tests for Emergent Stimulus Relations

Area of Science:

• Behavioral Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Language Acquisition

Background:

• Understanding the mechanisms of verbal behavior is crucial for learning.
• The role of different mediation strategies (verbal and visual) in learning is not fully understood.
• Intraverbal naming tasks assess the ability to associate words with objects or concepts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how disrupting verbal and visual mediation affects performance in intraverbal naming tasks.
• To compare the effects of different training sequences (tact instruction first vs. intraverbal instruction first) on mediation disruption.
• To determine if verbal or visual mediation plays a more significant role in intraverbal naming acquisition.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted involving participants in different training sequences: tact instruction prior to intraverbal instruction (TI) and intraverbal instruction prior to tact instruction (IT).
• Experiment 1 disrupted verbal mediation during an image-matching test.
• Experiment 2 disrupted visual imagery during intraverbal training.

Main Results:

• Disrupting verbal mediation during testing did not show differential effects based on the training sequence.
• Disrupting visual imagery during intraverbal training significantly affected response speed in the IT group.
• Results suggest that verbal behavior at test can aid correct responding.

Conclusions:

• While verbal behavior may support performance, alternative stimulus control sources are available when names are learned before intraverbal training.
• Visual mediation appears to be a more critical factor for participants trained with intraverbal instruction preceding tact instruction.
• The findings highlight the complex interplay between different mediation strategies and training orders in language learning.