Intraverbal stimulus-response reversibility: Fluency, familiarity effects, and implications for stimulus equivalence.
Teach both ways of an intraverbal pair; flipping the stimulus and response sides without extra training drops accuracy to a large share.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team taught 12 college students to name French words when they saw the English word on a screen.
After the kids reached a large share correct, the computer flipped the task. Now the French word popped up and they had to say the English one.
No extra teaching happened — the researchers just checked if the reverse direction worked for free.
What they found
Accuracy crashed from near-perfect to about a large share when the direction flipped.
Most adults could not do the reverse even though they had just mastered the first way.
The drop shows symmetry does not happen automatically in intraverbal training.
How this fits with other research
Borrero et al. (2005) used the same lab set-up with adults and also saw that changing which stimulus signals a response rewires brain areas.
Tracey et al. (1974) treated handwriting as an operant and found the response form stayed steady when schedules changed. Together these studies warn that topography may hold while stimulus control breaks.
None of the neighbor papers claimed free symmetry, so the 1997 result extends the caution to verbal relations: you must teach both directions.
Why it matters
If you teach a client to label “apple” when you say “fruit,” do not assume they will say “fruit” when you show an apple. Build both directions into your program from the start. Add quick reversals during fluency checks and re-teach as needed. This small step saves weeks of retraining later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
English-speaking subjects with little knowledge of the French language used a computerized flashcard program, Think Fast, to learn 16 English-French word pairs (intraverbals) by typing one word of the pair when presented with the other word as a textual stimulus. In Phase 1, half of the intraverbals were taught from French to English (FE-1) and half from English to French (EF-1). Then, in Phase 2, training continued with the stimulus and response items of each intraverbal reversed, i.e., cards previously in the FE-1 condition were trained from English to French (EF-2) and cards previously in the EF-1 condition were trained from French to English (FE-2). Feedback was provided throughout the experiment. Reversing the stimulus and response items in Phase 2 significantly reduced rate correct and accuracy scores for eight of the nine subjects. In Experiments 1 and 2, this effect was more pronounced for cards in the EF-2 condition; in Experiment 3, when the criterion for a "correct" response was more lenient, there was no consistent difference between cards in the EF-2 and FE-2 conditions. Symmetry, as indicated by accuracy scores on the first trial in Phase 2, was generally poor: eight of the nine subjects averaged only 29% correct when asked to respond to the reversed relations for the first time. We relate our paradigm and results to recent developments in fluency, verbal behavior, and stimulus equivalence, and provide directions for future research.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 1997 · doi:10.1007/BF03392914