Differential effect of training impure tacts versus pure tacts plus intraverbal on the emergence of new verbal operants: A conceptual and methodological study.
Teach impure tacts first—they seed faster growth of novel impure tacts than pure tact plus intraverbal drills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
MMcQuaid et al. (2024) compared two ways to teach tacts. One group learned impure tacts—responses that name an item and carry extra verbal context. The other group learned pure tacts plus separate intraverbal drills.
The team then watched which path made new impure tacts pop up without extra teaching.
What they found
Impure-tact training won. People who first practiced impure tacts later produced more novel impure tacts than the pure-tact group.
Even when the follow-up lesson was only intraverbal, the impure-tact history kept giving a boost.
How this fits with other research
Aragon et al. (2024) also chased emergent intraverbal tacts, but with autistic children and a joint-control fix. Their data extend MA’s adult findings to kids who need extra stimulus support.
Shillingsburg et al. (2019) mixed mastered tacts and listener trials right before intraverbal probes. That quick interspersal matches MA’s theme: recent tact experience speeds up later untaught answers.
Sundberg (2016) and Cariveau et al. (2022) tried compound verbal cues and saw overshadowing—responses got stuck on the first word. MA’s impure-tact method sidesteps that trap by folding context into the tact itself, not tacking on extra words.
Why it matters
Start verbal programs with impure tacts if you want flexible, untrained responses later. A short block of “This is a red truck we drive” beats teaching “truck” alone and then drilling “What do we drive?” The payoff shows up in the next session when new combinations emerge for free.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The aim of this research was to test the effect of training impure tact versus pure tact and intraverbals on the emergence of new verbal operants (impure tacts), thus establishing a conceptual and methodological differentiation on these operants. This was done by varying the training order of intraverbal or impure tact to analyze and confirm whether or not impure tact is the mere sum of pure tact plus intraverbal and therefore has different functions and consequences in learning. An experiment was conducted with 30 participants randomly assigned to three groups. In Group 1, pure tact plus intraverbal and then impure tact were trained. In Group 3 the training order of these operants was counterbalanced. Group 2 was the control group, training only pure tact plus intraverbal. After the training phases, the emergence of impure tacts was tested. The results of this research indicate that the training of impure tacts favors the emergence of new impure tacts to a greater extent than the training of pure tact plus intraverbal and that they therefore have different functions. It is also shown that variation in the order of presentation of the type of training influences the subsequent emergence of new operants (impure tacts), so that creating a previous history of learning in impure tacts favors emergence even when the intraverbal alone is subsequently trained. This has important implications at both conceptual and methodological levels as it would contribute to the development of more effective language training technologies.
, 2024 · doi:10.3758/s13420-024-00636-1