A comparison of four strategies for teaching a small foreign-language vocabulary.

Petursdottir et al. (2009) tested four ways to teach foreign words to two elementary kids. They used tact training, listener training, native-to-foreign intraverbal, and foreign-to-native intraverbal. An alternating-treatments design let each child try every method in the same week.

Sessions lasted ten minutes. The team tracked if the kids could say, point to, or answer questions with the new words without extra teaching.

All four drills helped the kids learn some untaught responses, but none hit mastery across every skill. Native-to-foreign intraverbal was the hardest; foreign-to-native intraverbal came next.

Tact and listener training gave the best emergent gains, yet both kids still needed more practice to reach fluency.

Elliott et al. (1991) extends this idea to adults with autism and ID. They also compared structured and natural language drills and saw equal long-term gains, showing the comparison logic works across ages and diagnoses.

Tavassoli et al. (2012) and Virues-Ortega et al. (2015) show the flip side: accurate foreign terms matter. Their glossaries help BCBAs pick the right words before any drill starts, just as Ingeborg et al. had to choose exact Spanish labels.

Glodowski et al. (2025) used a similar within-subject design to compare quiz lengths. Both studies remind us that more trials do not always help; five questions or a tact set can be enough.

If you teach second-language vocabulary, rotate tact and listener drills first. They give the biggest emergent boost. Save the harder native-to-foreign intraverbal for later and add extra practice. Check the Tavassoli et al. (2012) Finnish glossary or Virues-Ortega et al. (2015) Spanish rules to be sure your stimulus words are exact before you start. Expect to layer in more exposures; one method rarely wins alone.