An evaluation of intraverbal training to generate socially appropriate responses to novel questions.

Einar T. Ingvarsson, Jeffrey H. Tiger, Gregory P. Hanley, & Kasey M. Stephenson (2007). An evaluation of intraverbal training to generate socially appropriate responses to novel questions. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 40, 411-429.

Four preschool children (with and without disabilities), who often responded inappropriately to questions, participated in the current study. Pretest results were used to create sets of questions that the children either did or did not answer correctly (i.e., known and unknown questions). We then sequentially taught two different responses to a subset of unknown questions: (a) “I don’t know” (IDK), and (b) “I don’t know, please tell me” (IDKPTM). Results showed that following acquisition with the target set, both responses generalized across questions and teachers for all participants. Following IDK training, some undesirable generalization of IDK to known questions occurred for 3 participants. Training of IDKPTM with the addition of a restricted reinforcement contingency was sufficient to establish correct answers to a portion of previously unknown questions. The importance of teaching generalized responses that enable the acquisition of novel intraverbals is discussed.

DESCRIPTORS: behavioral cusp, generalization, intraverbal behavior, intraverbal training, preschool children, verbal behavior