Using Precision Teaching to Evaluate the Effects of Tact Training on Intraverbals Relations

Three autistic children with intellectual disability joined the study.

The team used precision teaching to build fast, accurate tact naming without pictures.

They tracked whether the kids could later name categories out loud when asked, like "Name three animals."

After fluent tact drills, all three kids could name whole categories they had never been taught.

The intraverbal answers popped up without extra training or rewards.

Hewett et al. (2024) seems to disagree. In their study only one of four children got emergent intraverbals after plain tact training. The gap is speed and fluency: Vascelli pushed for high-speed responding; Kate used slower single-exemplar drills.

Pantano et al. (2026) built on the idea two years later. They showed you can get the same leap if you mix element tacts and intraverbal categorization, even without full fluency.

ILee et al. (2022) took the opposite road: they started with listener training and still saw intraverbals emerge. Together the papers say "many doors lead to the same room."

Zhou et al. (2024) stretched the tact-first rule into foreign-language learning through telehealth and got the same tidy emergence, proving the pattern holds across settings and content.

You can save hours of direct intraverbal drills. First, run short, timed tact sets until the child hits fluent speeds. Then simply probe category questions; if answers show up, keep practicing tacts to maintain the skill. If not, add Pantano’s element-plus-categorization pack or a brief multiple-exemplar burst as Kate suggests. Either way, let the data guide your next step instead of assuming massed intraverbal training is required.