On the functional role of the verbalization in correspondence training procedures.
Drop the child verbal rule—adult prompt alone keeps toy-play correspondence intact.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with three preschoolers in a classroom play area.
They used a multiple-baseline design across toy-play behaviors.
Kids first learned to say, “I will play gently,” then got praise if the play matched the rule.
Later the researchers dropped the child verbal step and kept only the adult prompt.
What they found
Toy play stayed the same whether or not the child said the rule out loud.
Only the adult prompt mattered.
The verbal self-instruction added zero extra benefit.
How this fits with other research
Clark et al. (1977) saw the same thing eleven years earlier: skip the extra verbal training.
Najafichaghabouri et al. (2024) also found that adult antecedents control kids’ answers in only some children, not all.
Together the papers show that asking kids to “say it first” is often wasted time.
Why it matters
You can save minutes in every session by dropping the child verbal step.
Just give the clear adult prompt and reinforce the matched action.
This keeps therapy efficient and still gets the correspondence you want.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We investigated the functional role of the child's and experimenter's verbalizations in correspondence training procedures with toy play behaviors in a day-care center setting. Six children participated in a multiple baseline across responses and/or multielement design. Baseline conditions were followed by reinforcement of verbalization. This resulted in little or no change in responding, similar to findings of previous research. Experiment I isolated the child's verbalization as the variable under study. With an experimenter's prompt and postplay reinforcement held constant, the effects of including versus omitting the child's verbalization were examined. A contingency-space analysis revealed that the presence or absence of the child's verbalization exerted no influence on play with the target toy. In Experiment II, a condition in which no experimenter's prompt occurred was added. Results suggested that the complete absence of any antecedent verbalization, by child or experimenter, resulted in much lower rates of play with the target toys. Again, however, when the experimenter's prompt was included, no clear difference was noted between conditions in which the child verbalized and conditions in which the child did not. These results raise doubts about the commonly held view of correspondence training procedures as a method of promoting self-regulation.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1988 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1988.21-345