Comparing Manipulations to Enhance Stimulus Salience during Intraverbal Training.
Pick intraverbal answers that sound nothing alike—shared sounds slow kids down.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Halbur et al. (2024) asked a simple question. Does it matter if the words in each intraverbal set sound alike?
They used an alternating-treatments design with kids on the spectrum. One set shared sounds (overlapping). The other set was all new sounds (non-overlapping).
The team tracked how fast each child reached mastery on each set.
What they found
Sets with brand-new sounds were mastered faster. Sets that reused sounds slowed learning.
The benefit showed up early and stayed across new lessons.
How this fits with other research
Kodak et al. (2020) and Vladescu et al. (2021) both looked at set size for tacts. They asked, "How many pictures per set?" Mary flips the question to intraverbals and asks, "Do the words sound too alike?"
Zhi et al. (2023) also tweaked intraverbal lessons, but they changed feedback style, not sound overlap. Mary’s sound-overlap twist is new.
Cordeiro et al. (2022) speeded up intraverbal lessons by tightening mastery rules. Mary adds another layer: pick words that don’t rhyme or share syllables.
Why it matters
Next time you run intraverbal trials, scan your target list. If every answer starts with the same sound or rhymes, swap some out. Fresh sounds give the learner a clearer cue and can cut sessions. Mix this tip with tight mastery rules from Cordeiro and you get a faster path to fluent intraverbals.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with autism are often taught auditory conditional discriminations in the form of personal information questions that might prove useful in conversation (e.g., "What is your favorite food?" "Pizza" and "What is your favorite color?" "Purple"). In these questions, the auditory stimuli presented as part of the compound discriminative stimulus (i.e., what, favorite, color/food) do not always simultaneously control responding. If all components of the auditory stimulus do not control responding, a child may master 1 target but have trouble acquiring subsequent targets that have a component of a previously learned auditory stimulus because the previously learned response is emitted. One way to avoid this problem is to teach many targets that have no overlapping component stimuli before introducing targets that include a previously learned component. Another way to avoid the problem is to systematically introduce overlapping stimulus components simultaneously to facilitate control by all relevant components. Three children with autism were taught auditory conditional discriminations. An adapted alternating-treatments design was used to compare the use of training sets with programmed overlap of component auditory stimuli to training sets with no overlap of stimulus components. The effects of these 2 arrangements were evaluated on trials to criterion and percentage accuracy during acquisition. All participants reached mastery faster with at least 1 target set in the nonoverlap condition compared to the overlapping condition; 2 out of the 3 participants met the mastery criteria for both overlapping and nonoverlapping targets at a similar rate by the 3rd training set.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 2024 · doi:10.1007/BF03393090