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Related Experiment Videos

Producing generative sentence usage by imitation and reinforcement procedures.

J R Lutzker, J A Sherman

    Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
    |January 1, 1974
    PubMed
    Summary

    Imitation and reinforcement effectively teach children, including those with developmental delays, to use correct subject-verb agreement in sentences. This method promotes generative language skills for both singular and plural sentence structures.

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    Area of Science:

    • Linguistics
    • Developmental Psychology
    • Behavioral Analysis

    Background:

    • Subject-verb agreement is a fundamental aspect of grammatical competence.
    • Children with developmental delays often face challenges in acquiring complex grammatical structures.
    • Imitation and reinforcement are established behavioral techniques for skill acquisition.

    Purpose of the Study:

    • To investigate the efficacy of imitation and reinforcement procedures in teaching subject-verb agreement to toddlers.
    • To determine if these procedures can foster generative sentence usage in children with and without developmental delays.
    • To explore the potential for cross-generalization of learned grammatical rules.

    Main Methods:

    • Utilized imitation and reinforcement to train two classes of sentences: singular (using 'is') and plural (using 'are').

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  • Employed a multiple baseline design across subjects and sentence types.
  • Assessed generalization of learned rules using novel probe pictures and a reversal/retraining phase for one subject.

    • Main Results:

    • Four out of five subjects demonstrated generative sentence usage, producing novel, untrained sentences of the trained type.
    • One subject spontaneously produced correct sentences for both singular and plural probes after training only singular sentences.
    • Reversal and retraining confirmed the functional role of imitation and reinforcement in producing generative responses, even across sentence types for one subject.

    Conclusions:

    • Imitation and reinforcement procedures are effective in teaching subject-verb agreement and promoting generative sentence usage in toddlers.
    • These behavioral techniques show promise for addressing grammatical challenges in children with developmental delays.
    • The findings suggest that learning one grammatical structure may facilitate the acquisition of related structures, indicating potential for cross-linguistic generalization.