Toward a functional analysis of private verbal self-regulation.
Self-instructions truly drive shopping skills in adults with mild ID—remove them and performance tanks, restore them and skills rebound.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with adults who have mild intellectual disability. They wanted to know if the words people say to themselves actually control shopping skills.
First they taught the adults to talk themselves through each shopping step out loud. Later the adults whispered or thought the words. The researchers then blocked the self-talk to see if skills would drop.
What they found
When the adults used self-instructions, shopping errors stayed low. When the team blocked the self-talk, errors shot back up. Giving the same rules through an audio recording fixed the errors again.
This back-and-forth shows the words were truly controlling the behavior, not just tagging along.
How this fits with other research
Feldman et al. (1999) asked students with moderate ID to press a button and listen to their own prerecorded cues. Off-task behavior fell just like in the target study, but no one had to speak out loud. Together the papers show both spoken and taped self-cues work.
Rasing et al. (1992) had already proven that written task lists plus feedback can teach new skills. The target study moves that idea into spoken words and proves the words themselves are the active ingredient.
Cohen et al. (2022) took the same logic to adults with ASD. They paired self-management with textual cues to teach social responses. Skills rose fast and lasted, showing the principle crosses diagnoses and ages.
Why it matters
You now have a simple test: if a client’s performance crashes after you remove self-talk, the words were doing the work. Re-install the cues in any form—spoken, taped, or written—and skills return. Use this reversal as a quick probe before thinning prompts.
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Join Free →Record the client’s self-instructions on a phone; let them play it while shopping, then fade to whispered self-talk.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
We developed a methodology, derived from the theoretical literatures on rule-governed behavior and private events, to experimentally investigate the relationship between covert verbal self-regulation and nonverbal behavior. The methodology was designed to assess whether (a) nonverbal behavior was under the control of covert rules and (b) verbal reports of these rules were functionally equivalent to the covert rules that control non-verbal behavior. The research was conducted in the context of teaching shopping skills to persons with mild intellectual disabilities using a self-instruction training format. In Phase 1, 4 participants were successfully taught to perform shopping skills using overt and covert self-instructions. The self-instructions were then blocked under overt and covert self-instruction conditions, which resulted in a reversal of shopping skills to baseline levels. This indicated that the overt and covert self-instructions might be controlling responding. In Phase 2, we demonstrated that the self-instructions, when used as external directives, produced successful shopping with 3 other participants. By demonstrating that self-rules can produce correct responding when used as external directives, we were more confident that it was the self-instructions and not other verbal or nonverbal behavior that controlled responding under overt, covert, and blocking conditions in Phase 1.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1997 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1997.30-43