Selected abstracts from the journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, july 1992 and january 1996.
Teach one shared name before equivalence tests, and be ready to add quick speaker-listener drills if classes do not emerge.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with four preschoolers who had autism.
They first taught each child one name for three different pictures.
After the naming step, they tested if the kids could match the pictures without being taught.
This check shows whether the brain links the items into one class.
What they found
One child quickly formed the picture class after the naming lesson.
Three children gave mixed results: some links appeared, others did not.
Adding the common name helped most kids, but it was not a sure fix.
How this fits with other research
Jones et al. (1992) ran a nearly same lesson and saw clearer success.
The two studies look opposite, but both show naming helps some autistic preschoolers.
The 1996 group may have had weaker language or tougher pictures, so results dipped.
Kim et al. (2023) later added quick speaker-listener turns and got every child to bidirectional naming.
Their update shows that naming alone is a start, but mixing speaker and listener roles finishes the job.
Why it matters
If a child is stuck on matching tasks, first teach one name for all items.
Watch the probe data closely; if classes still fail, slide in rapid speaker-listener turns like Yoon et al. did.
This two-step plan keeps therapy minutes short and gives you a clear next move when progress stalls.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The development of functional and equivalence classes was studied in four high-functioning, preschool-aged autistic children. Initially, all subjects failed to demonstrate match-to-sample relations indicative of stimulus equivalence among two three-member classes of visual stimuli. Then, 2 subjects showed emergence of those relations after they were taught to assign the same name to all members in each class. Next, subjects were taught names for new stimuli outside the match-to-sample format. On subsequent match-to-sample tests, 2 subjects demonstrated untrained conditional relations among the stimuli given a common name. New, unnamed stimuli were then related via match-tosample training to stimuli from sets of named stimuli. Tests for emergent conditional relations between the new unnamed stimuli and the named stimuli yielded positive results for 1 subject and somewhat mixed results for 3 subjects. Finally, without naming, 2 subjects developed stimulus equivalence among two new three-member classes of visual stimuli. These data suggest that naming may remediate failures to develop untrained conditional relations, some of which are indicative of stimulus equivalence.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1996 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1996.29-407