Transfer between receptive and productive language in developmentally disabled children.
Teach expressive labels first—productive training reliably builds receptive vocabulary, but the reverse does not.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with six children who had developmental delays. Each child got two kinds of teaching. Some days the child only pointed to the right picture when the teacher said the word. Other days the child had to say the word when the teacher showed the picture. The teachers kept score to see which kind of teaching helped more.
They used short drills with praise and candy for right answers. After each round they tested the child the opposite way. If the child had just practiced saying “cup,” they now checked if the child could point to the cup when asked.
What they found
Five out of six kids learned to point after they had practiced saying the word. Only one or two kids learned to say the word after they had practiced pointing. Teaching the child to speak first gave a free boost in listening skills. Teaching listening first gave almost no boost in speaking.
How this fits with other research
Cortez et al. (2022) later saw the same thing with foreign words. They also found that making the child say the word first helped more than making the child listen first.
Bailey et al. (1990) used video tapes instead of live drills and still got the same story. Expressive training helped both speaking and listening. Receptive-only training helped neither.
Neves et al. (2023) looked newer and found strong two-way gains, but they used errorless equivalence lessons, not old-style drills. Their newer method may close the gap that DeVellis et al. (1979) first showed.
Why it matters
Start by teaching the child to say the name. Once the child can say “dog,” the listening part often follows without extra work. Save time and skip the long receptive-only drills. This small flip can speed up early language programs for many kids you see every day.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Run the first trial of each new noun as a tact: have the child say the name, then immediately probe if they can also point to it.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive and productive language acquisition in developmentally disabled children. A single‐subject operant methodology was employed to evaluate the effect of training in one mode on performance in the other mode. Noun labels for pictured objects were used as the unit of analysis. Six children with severe language deficits participated in the experiment. Each subject learning to identify a different set of five pictures in each of four successively administered training conditions. In the first condition, a set of pictures was trained in the productive mode. In the second condition, a different set was trained in the receptive mode. These training conditions were then repeated using two additional sets of pictures. Training was done using reinforcement for correct responses and prompting for incorrect responses. Nonreinforced probes were conducted throughout training to assess performance in the untrained mode. The pictures in each set were trained successively so that transfer across the language modes could be studied separately for each response trained. All subjects successfully met the criteria for learning each picture set in both the receptive and productive training conditions. The probe data showed that opposite‐modality performance improved as a function of both types of training, although performance levels differed. After productive training, five of six subjects' performance was highly accurate on receptive probes. By contrast, receptive training resulted in limited correct productive performance. Transfer from receptive training was negatively related to subjects' use of extra‐experimental labels on productive probe trials. In addition to these competing response errors, subjects frequently made articulation errors. The findings suggest that for retarded children similar to those studied here, productive training will be sufficient to establish accurate receptive performance on vocabulary tasks. However, receptive training does not appear to be either a necessary or a sufficient condition for productive performance. The results do not support the reception‐then‐production training sequence based on normal language development.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1979 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1979.12-311