On the origins of naming and other symbolic behavior.
Naming is the verbal keystone; once a child links object and name both ways, new words and concepts emerge without extra teaching.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Cameron et al. (1996) wrote a theory paper. They asked how children learn to name things.
They said naming is not just echoing a word. It is learning two-way links: object to name and name to object.
What they found
The authors claim that once a child has bidirectional naming, all other verbal skills grow from it.
Mands, tacts, and intraverbals are just versions of that same name link.
The child can now think symbolically without more training.
How this fits with other research
Cao et al. (2018) tested the idea. They taught English-speaking preschoolers to echo Chinese sounds. The kids then showed bidirectional naming in Chinese. This supports the 1996 claim that echoic training seeds the naming engine.
Hill et al. (2020) went further. They used name-note relations to teach piano. Kids then played untrained songs. The study moves the naming theory from words to music.
Peters et al. (2013) looked at stimulus order during pairing. Word-first and picture-first worked the same for emergent tacts. This adds detail: once naming exists, the path into the relation is flexible.
Why it matters
If you build strong bidirectional naming first, you may not need to teach every later verbal skill piece by piece. Try starting new language or academic goals with quick echoic-name checks. If the child echoes the new word and then points to the item when you say it later, the engine is running. You can move faster and let emergent learning do some of the work for you.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We identify naming as the basic unit of verbal behavior, describe the conditions under which it is learned, and outline its crucial role in the development of stimulus classes and, hence, of symbolic behavior. Drawing upon B. F. Skinner's functional analysis and the theoretical work of G. H. Mead and L. S. Vygotsky, we chart how a child, through learning listener behavior and then echoic responding, learns bidirectional relations between classes of objects or events and his or her own speaker-listener behavior, thus acquiring naming-a higher order behavioral relation. Once established, the bidirectionality incorporated in naming extends across behavior classes such as those identified by Skinner as the mand, tact, and intraverbal so that each becomes a variant of the name relation. We indicate how our account informs the specification of rule-governed behavior and provides the basis for an experimental analysis of symbolic behavior. Furthermore, because naming is both evoked by, and itself evokes, classes of events it brings about new or emergent behavior such as that reported in studies of stimulus equivalence. This account is supported by data from a wide range of match-to-sample studies that also provide evidence that stimulus equivalence in humans is not a unitary phenomenon but the outcome of a number of different types of naming behavior.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1996 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1996.65-185