Nonsimultaneous stimulus presentations and their role in listener naming
Present object and name at different moments to create solid listener naming instead of rote stimulus tracking.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sivaraman et al. (2021) worked with four neurotypical toddlers. They wanted to see if listener naming would emerge after a special kind of training.
The team showed each child an object first. A few seconds later they said the name. They never showed the object and said the name at the same time.
What they found
Every toddler learned to pick the correct object when they heard the name. The skill showed up only after the nonsimultaneous training.
When the kids got regular teaching that showed object and name together, nothing extra emerged.
How this fits with other research
Kim et al. (2023) later copied the idea with autistic preschoolers. They added quick speaker-listener turns when probing alone failed. Both studies show MET can create naming, but older kids or those with autism may need extra probing or mixed-operant boosts.
Carnerero et al. (2014) got similar emergent listener gains by simply letting autistic children watch picture-name pairs. Their passive watching worked, yet the 2021 study proves that timing alone—object first, name second—can do the job even without simultaneous pairing.
Petursdottir et al. (2016) found kids mastered receptive ID faster when they heard the word before they saw the pictures. That lines up with the 2021 result: order matters, and separating the stimuli can help learning.
Why it matters
If you want true emergent listener naming, split the stimulus events. Show the item, clear the table, then give the name. This small timing tweak prevents the child from relying on a simple simultaneous cue and builds a stronger equivalence network. Try it next session with one new object set and track if the child later selects the item on first hearing the name.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Previous studies on naming have presented the object and its name simultaneously during both training and testing, and thus the training component may establish a transformation of function directly between the object and the name. Successful tests for listener naming may thus not require the emergence of a novel (entailed) transformation of function. The current study aimed to control for this possibility by presenting the object and the name sequentially and nonsimultaneously. Eight typically developing toddlers participated in the current study. During name training, objects and names were presented nonsimultaneously, and all participants failed to emit listener-naming responses during the first test session. Subsequently, 4 participants received multiple exemplar training, which led to improvements in listener naming for all 4; and speaker naming for only 1 participant. As a control condition, the remaining 4 participants were tested repeatedly, without multiple exemplar training, and did not show any consistent improvements in their listener or speaker performances. Multiple exemplar training thus appeared to be effective in establishing generalized listener responses, which involved generating entailed transformation of functions. The strategy of using nonsimultaneous stimulus presentations could allow for greater precision in identifying the behavioral processes involved in listener-naming.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2021 · doi:10.1002/jeab.715