The effects of listener training on discriminative control by elements of compound stimuli in children with disabilities.
Listener training on picture pairs can create new naming and listening skills, but always test if the child sees both parts.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team taught five children with autism or intellectual disability to pick the correct picture when they heard a made-up name. Each picture was really two pictures stuck together, like a red truck on top of a blue ball.
After the kids learned to select the compound, the teachers tested them. They asked the kids to name the whole compound and to pick it when they heard its name, even though they had never practiced those tasks.
What they found
Three children passed both tests. They could name the compound and pick it out without extra teaching.
Two children failed. They only paid attention to one part of the picture, so their answers were wrong when the teachers moved the parts around.
How this fits with other research
Cicchetti et al. (2014) and Early et al. (2012) also used listener training and saw most kids with autism pop out new tacts. Their success rate lines up with the three who passed here.
Grey et al. (2024) later warned that compound pictures can fool you. They showed that some kids only look at one piece, just like the two who failed in this study.
Bergmann et al. (2023) flipped the idea to sounds. They paired sounds with pictures and got faster learning, showing that compounds help in other senses too.
Why it matters
You can save teaching time if you check for overselectivity first. Run quick probe trials with the parts swapped. If the kid fails, break the compound apart and teach each piece alone before you put them back together. This simple check keeps your program from stalling.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →After teaching a compound, shuffle the parts and ask the child to select or name it to spot overselectivity early
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The purpose of the current study was to assess whether the establishment of listener relations with compound stimuli as samples and comparisons would lead to the emergence of: (1) speaker behavior in the form of tacts of the compound stimuli; (2) listener and tact responses for untaught compounds; and (3) listener and tact responses for the isolated properties of compounds. Participants were four boys diagnosed with autism and one diagnosed with intellectual disability. We taught participants to select among three compound comparisons consisting of combinations of shapes and patterns in the presence of the corresponding dictated word. Subsequently, we tested for the emergence of tacts for the trained compounds, as well as tact and listener relations for six untaught compounds and their properties. In general, results showed that the acquisition of listener relations led to the emergence of the corresponding tacts, as well as the emergence of listener and tact responses for untaught combinations for three out of five participants. By contrast, the other two participants showed responding characteristic of restricted stimulus control. These results suggest that the establishment of bidirectional relations between listener and speaker behaviors may facilitate the emergence of control by properties of compound stimuli.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2015 · doi:10.1002/jeab.161