Establishing derived requesting skills in adults with severe developmental disabilities.

Anne and colleagues worked with three adults who had severe developmental disabilities. None could read or write requests on their own.

The team first taught picture requests. Then they taught conditional relations: when the adult saw a picture, they picked the matching dictated name, then the matching text. No one practiced typing the request.

After the conditional drills, all three adults could suddenly type the correct word to ask for the item. They had never been taught to type requests directly.

The requests appeared without extra training. The skill emerged from the equivalence relations they had learned.

Chadwick et al. (2000) showed that feedback alone can create derived relational responding in typical adults. Anne’s group moved the same idea into severe disability services and got real-world requests.

Dixon et al. (2017) and Dixon et al. (2021) later repeated the trick with preschool children using the PEAK-E curriculum. They found the same emergent magic, but for categorical questions instead of requests.

Petursdottir et al. (2019) looked at training order in typical adults and found tact-first beats intraverbal-first. Anne’s study used picture→dictated name→text order, matching the tact-first idea, but their learners had far more severe delays.

You can build a full request repertoire without chaining endless trials. Teach picture requests and conditional relations once; typed requests pop out for free. Probe for emergent text requests before you start a separate typing program. Save your client hours of drill and you hours of data.