The establishment of auditory equivalence classes with a go/no‐go successive matching‐to‐sample procedure

Hanson and team asked if people can build sound-to-sound word families without any pictures. They used a go/no-go game on a laptop. College students heard a sample word, then two more words. They pressed the space bar only if the second word matched the sample.

Each person sat through hundreds of quick trials across three phases: train, test-symmetry, test-transitivity. The words were nonsense syllables like "zup" and "baf" so no one had prior links. The whole session took about 45 minutes.

All the adults passed symmetry: if they learned A→B, they instantly picked B→A. About most also passed transitivity and full equivalence. Eight people even said new word pairs out loud they had never been taught, showing intraverbal emergence.

In short, ears alone can build new sound classes. The go/no-go method worked without error feedback or pictures.

White (1979) showed that matching-to-sample rarely gives perfect one-to-one results; slopes hover around 0.9. Hanson’s data follow that rule: most people match, but a few need extra trials. The old math still predicts the new auditory task.

Glenn (1993) used the same lab set-up but looked at self-reports, not equivalence. Both studies prove the MTS frame is flexible; you can swap in sounds or questions and still get clean data.

Iao et al. (2024) and Geurts et al. (2008) work with toddlers who have ASD and focus on joint attention. They seem far off, yet they share a goal: linking basic behavioral building blocks to later language. Hanson shows one way to build those blocks in neurotypical adults, giving a baseline for later ASD work.

If you teach learners who rely on hearing (no vision or limited eye contact), go/no-go auditory MTS is a ready tool. You can probe whether they have formed sound classes before you ask them to speak or read. Next time you run verbal behavior therapy, try three nonsense words in a quick listen-and-hit game; you may uncover hidden equivalence networks that flashcards never show.