Establishing arbitrary comparative relations and referential transformations of stimulus function in individuals with autism

Two children with autism learned to pick the "bigger" or "smaller" picture when given made-up names.

The trainer first taught direct matches (A=B, B=C) with cartoon animals.

Later the kids saw new pairs and had to choose without further teaching.

Both children soon picked the correct bigger or smaller picture in every new pair.

The untrained choices showed up right away and stayed solid when the team retested the whole set.

Murphy et al. (2009) got the same jump from trained to untrained with "more-less" mands, proving comparative relations can emerge in autism.

Murphy et al. (2010) also showed derived mands, but for requesting items, not size; together the three studies say "train the network, not each item."

Chastain et al. (2025) pushed the idea further, building perspective-taking (I-You) frames; Belisle’s work is the earlier stepping-stone that showed abstract comparatives are possible.

You can stop drilling every bigger-smaller example. Teach a tiny network of arbitrary relations and let the child derive the rest. Start with two or three anchored pairs, test for emergent choices, and move to new stimuli only after the pattern holds. This saves hours of direct trial time and builds flexible language that transfers to novel pictures, objects, or even numbers.