Teaching reading and spelling: exclusion and stimulus equivalence.
Adding a quick word-building step after exclusion-based matching helps kids read untaught words.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Seven nonreaders joined a special reading program.
The kids picked the right word when the teacher said it out loud.
They also built each word with letter tiles.
The team later took the tiles away to see what happened.
What they found
Every child learned the trained words.
When they built words and picked them, they also read brand-new words.
When the building step was removed, the new-word reading dropped.
Building words made the skill stick to untaught words.
How this fits with other research
Clayborne et al. (2024) later used the same equivalence idea with preschoolers with autism.
They taught categories instead of reading, but the quick generalization matched.
Ghaziuddin et al. (1996) tried a different path that year.
They used assisted reading and also saw gains, yet they never tested generalization to new words.
The two 1996 papers do not clash; they simply show two tools that can live side-by-side.
Why it matters
If you run reading sessions, add a quick word-building step after the child picks the correct card.
It takes one minute, costs almost nothing, and can widen generalization without extra drills.
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Join Free →After the learner picks the correct word card, hand them letter tiles and have them build the word before the next trial.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
In Experiment 1, 7 nonreading children were exposed to a program designed to teach reading of 51 training words. The program featured an exclusion‐based procedure in which the children (a) matched printed to dictated words and (b) constructed (copied) printed words with movable letters and named them. All children learned to read the training words. Five children also read generalization words and showed progress in spelling. Experiment 2 applied the program to 4 different children, omitting the word‐construction task. They also learned to read the training words, but only 1 participant read generalization words. The data support a stimulus equivalence account of reading acquisition and suggest that reading generalization may be obtained, especially when the teaching program includes word construction.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1996 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1996.29-451