Correspondence training, prior verbal training, and control of nonverbal behavior via control of verbal behavior.

The team worked with preschool kids in a classroom. They wanted to see if extra verbal practice helped correspondence training work better.

Half the kids got a warm-up where they said out loud what they would do. Then all kids got the same correspondence training: say the rule, do the action, get praise if the two matched.

Kids who got the extra verbal warm-up did not follow the rules any better. Their nonverbal actions matched their words just as often as the kids who skipped the warm-up.

In plain numbers: both groups hit about the same level of correct play, sharing, and clean-up. The added talking step made zero real-world difference.

Iwata (1988) ran almost the same check with toy play and got the same null result. Together the two papers show the verbal add-on is useless across different preschool tasks.

Robertson et al. (2013) looked at flash-card mixes and also found the simpler drill-only method beat the fancy mix. The pattern is the same: extra steps don’t pay off when time is tight.

Perez et al. (2015) flips the coin. They showed adults can learn matching just by saying ‘A goes with B.’ That study proves verbal behavior can control nonverbal acts, but only when the task is built for it. Preschool correspondence training is not that task.

Stop wasting minutes on verbal warm-ups before correspondence training. Go straight to the rule-state, action, reward loop. You’ll save session time and still get the same kid follow-through.