Baseline training sequence affects speed of emergent conditional discriminations

Petursdottir et al. (2019) asked: Does the order of early drills change how fast new relations pop up later?

College students with typical speech first learned name-object pairs. Half started with tact training (say the name when shown the item). The other half started with intraverbal training (answer "What do you eat with?" when given a cue).

Next, everyone got match-to-sample probes. The team timed how quickly each student picked the correct picture without being taught that test directly.

Tact-first students hit the correct match-to-sample pictures sooner than intraverbal-first students.

Final accuracy ended up the same once students could also answer the questions correctly. Speed, not accuracy, was the difference.

Tassé et al. (2013) extends the same idea to autism. Three adolescents got only tact lessons, yet later answered new intraverbal questions they had never practiced. The tact-first advantage appears in both neurotypical adults and autistic teens.

May et al. (2019) conceptually replicates the finding in bilingual kindergarteners. After group tact drills, half the children produced untrained Spanish-English intraverbals. Again, tact practice sparked later verbal links.

Jennings et al. (2023) looks like a contradiction at first. They alternated tact and intraverbal lessons and saw mixed results. The key difference: they required mastery of every part skill before testing. That extra step slowed overall speed, showing that strict sequencing matters most when you probe emergent relations right after baseline.

If you want new relations to emerge quickly, run tact trials first and check for emergent intraverbals before adding extra programs. This saves teaching time for typically verbal clients and for many learners with autism. When progress stalls, look back: did you skip the tact step, or are prerequisite skills still weak? A simple Monday switch—start with tacts, then probe—can cut sessions needed before mastery.