Naming and categorization in young children: vocal tact training.
One tact name taught to several shapes can spark a whole new category for toddlers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Oliver et al. (2002) worked with toddlers and preschoolers who had no diagnosis. They taught each child to tact several odd shapes with one common name, like calling six different blobs "zup."
After the kids could name the shapes, the team tested whether the children would also group those shapes together without extra teaching.
What they found
Most children quickly formed a new category. They would point to all "zup" shapes when asked and call new blobs "zup" even though they had never seen them before.
The single tact lesson created an emergent stimulus class: the kids acted as if all shapes in the set were the same thing.
How this fits with other research
Vollmer et al. (1996) first argued that naming builds equivalence classes. Oliver et al. (2002) gave the live demo with toddlers, matching the theory.
Ribeiro et al. (2020) later tried a similar plan with children with autism but used many tact names for the same picture. Their kids learned more slowly, a negative result that shows the power of the original one-name method.
Dass et al. (2018) extended the idea to smells in autism and got positive emergence, proving the trick works across senses and populations.
Why it matters
You can create new categories in minutes by giving one label to several items. This saves trial time and builds generative language. Try it next session: pick three novel pictures, teach one tact for all, then test if the learner selects or names new members of the set. Watch the class grow without extra drills.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In three experiments, 2- to 4-year-old children, following pretraining with everyday objects, were presented with arbitrary stimuli of differing shapes. In Experiment 1A, 9 subjects were trained one common tact response, "zag," to three of these and a second tact, "vek," to another three. In category match-to-sample Test 1, 4 subjects sorted accurately when required only to look at the sample before selecting from five comparisons. The remaining 5 subjects succeeded in Test 2, in which they were required to tact the sample before selecting comparisons. Experiment 1B showed, for 2 of these subjects, that tact training with 12 arbitrary stimuli established two six-member classes that were still intact 6 weeks later. In Experiment 2, 3 new subjects participated in a common tact training procedure that ensured that none of the exemplars from the same class were presented together prior to the test for three-member classes. Two subjects passed category Test 1 and the third passed Test 2. Tests showed subjects' listener behavior in response to hearing /zog/ and /vek/ to be in place. These experiments indicate that common naming is effective in establishing arbitrary stimulus classes and that category match-to-sample testing provides a robust measure of categorization.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2002 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2002.78-527