Naming and categorization in young children: II. Listener behavior training.
Toddlers need both listener and tact training to reliably form new arbitrary categories.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers worked with 2- to young learners neurotypical kids. They first taught the children to point to one of three made-up shapes when they heard a nonsense name (listener training).
Next they checked if the kids could now name the shapes themselves (tact test). If a child failed, they added explicit tact training until the child could say the name.
What they found
Most toddlers passed the listener test but still could not name the shapes. Only after extra tact training did they label the shapes correctly.
The team concluded that listener training alone is usually not enough for young children to form new word-object categories.
How this fits with other research
Zhirnova et al. (2025) extends this idea. They added relational tact training (teaching kids to name same-different, bigger-smaller) and then saw emergent analogical performances. The 2025 study shows that when you combine listener and tact training, you can get higher-order skills like transitive relations.
Reichow et al. (2011) is a conceptual replication. They also used arbitrary shapes and found mixed results: some kids showed transitive class containment, some did not. Both papers agree that emergence is hit-or-miss without the right training pieces.
THOMAS et al. (1963) is the grandfather method. Their pigeon work taught simultaneous then delayed matching-to-sample. The 2004 child study borrowed that step-by-step matching format before adding the listener-tact twist.
Why it matters
If you run equivalence programs with toddlers, do not stop at listener drills. Build in explicit tact trials or you may miss true categorization. A quick Monday tweak: after the child points to the correct card, immediately ask “What’s this?” and reinforce the spoken name. Two extra seconds can save you weeks of re-training.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Following pretraining with everyday objects, 1- to 4-year-old children received listener training with three pairs of arbitrary stimuli of differing shapes. For each pair, 9 children were trained to select one stimulus in response to the spoken word /zog/ and the other to the spoken word /vek/. Next, in the look-at-sample category match-to-sample test, none categorized the six stimuli correctly when asked to look at the sample before selecting from five comparisons. Seven of these children failed a subsequent test of corresponding speaker behavior (tact test); following tact training, 5 of them passed either a repeat of the look-at-sample category test (2 subjects) or an alternative category test (3 subjects) in which they were required to tact the sample before selecting comparisons. The remaining 2 failed both category tests. Of the 2 who passed the tact test, 1 passed the tact-sample category test; the other failed to complete category testing. Two children were next given a second stimulus set. One passed the look-at-sample category test and the tact test; the other failed both tests but passed the tact-sample category test after tact training. The results show that 1- to 4-year-old children may learn listener behavior without corresponding speaker behavior. The results also show that common listener behavior is not sufficient to establish arbitrary stimulus classes, and they are consistent with the proposition that naming may be necessary for categorization of such stimuli.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2004 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2004.81-267