The Use of Multiple Exemplar Instruction to Induce Emergent Listener Discriminations and Emergent Intraverbal Vocal Responses in Autistic Children.
Add MEI immediately when tact training alone fails to produce intraverbal answers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four autistic kids got tact training first. They learned to name pictures like "apple" when the teacher asked "What is this?".
Next the team checked for two untaught skills. Would each child point to the apple when told "Touch apple" (listener)? Would they answer "What do you eat?" with "apple" (intraverbal)?
No extra teaching was given during these probes. The goal was to see if the first skill (tact) would spark the other two without help.
What they found
All four kids quickly showed the listener skill. They could point to the item right after tact training.
Only one child could also answer the intraverbal question. The other three stayed quiet or gave wrong answers.
The researchers then added Multiple Exemplar Instruction (MEI). They mixed tact, listener, and intraverbal trials together. After this boost, the last three kids gained the missing intraverbal answers.
How this fits with other research
ILee et al. (2022) looks like a mirror image. They gave listener training first and saw intraverbal answers pop up in five of six autistic kids. Kate et al. did the opposite — tact first — and got mixed results. The order of training may explain why emergence failed for most kids in the new study.
Zhou et al. (2026) stretched the idea further. They taught bilingual intraverbals to neurotypical and neurodivergent children and saw full skill bursts (tacts, listener, reverse intraverbals) in everyone. Their wider sample and cross-language setup show the phenomenon can scale when conditions are right.
Kay et al. (2020) reminds us that prompts matter. They found the last prompt a child meets is the one that works fastest next. Kate’s team used MEI as a prompt-rich package, aligning with Kay’s tip to rotate prompt types when skills stall.
Why it matters
If you run tact programs and intraverbals don’t emerge, don’t keep repeating tacts. Slide in MEI right away. Mix naming, touching, and question answers in the same set. This small shift saved three of four kids in the study and can save you weeks of extra trials.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study tested for the emergence of listener discriminations and intraverbal vocal responses following tact training with four autistic children. All participants were trained to tact the name and the favorite food of two contrived cartoon monsters in the presence of a picture of the monster (e.g., "What is the name of this monster?" - "Max" and "What food does the monster eat?" - "Sweets") to evaluate the effects of emergent listener discriminations and emergent intraverbal vocal responses. Once criterion was met on the tact training, participants were tested for emergent listener discriminations (e.g., "Who eats sweets?" And "Who is Max?") and emergent intraverbal vocal responses (e.g., "What food does Max eat?" - "Sweets" and "Who eats sweets?" - "Max" in the absence of the picture). After training, all four participants engaged in emergent listener responding but only one participant engaged in emergent intraverbal responding. Multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) was used to teach those who could not engage in emergent intraverbal responding, and it was demonstrated to be effective. These findings are educationally significant because efficiency of instruction is important to maximize instructional impact, and to reduce the time and resource-intensive nature of behavior-analytic programming.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 2024 · doi:10.1044/jshr.1401.05