The formation of visual stimulus equivalences in children.

Four children with typical development played a matching game on a computer.

They learned to pick a picture that went with a sample, then learned new match-ups until six pictures formed two sets of three.

The team never asked the kids to name the pictures; they only practiced matching.

After the matching lessons, the kids could match every picture to every other picture in its set without more teaching.

These emergent relations showed that the children had built stimulus equivalence classes based only on visual matching.

Barnes et al. (1990) widened the same method to deaf and hearing-impaired children and added a warning: kids need at least a two-year verbal age or equivalence does not form.

Jennings et al. (2017) flipped the script by showing that college students can build the same kind of classes through naming and talking alone, no matching trials needed.

Cerutti et al. (2004) seems to disagree: when pictures share the same use or meaning, equivalence takes longer to emerge. The clash disappears when you pick neutral pictures like Davison et al. (1984) did.

Lerman et al. (1995) and Melchiori (2000) took the lab trick into classrooms, teaching fraction-decimal relations and reading with the same emergent-learning power.

You now have two roads to equivalence: pure visual matching or language-based training. Check the learner’s verbal age first; if it is under two years, stay with matching. Pick pictures that do not do the same job to keep training fast, then watch new relations pop up without extra work.