Lowe, C. F., Horne, P. J., & Hughes, J. C. (2005).
Naming and categorization in young children: III. Vocal tact training
and transfer of function.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 83, 47-65.
Following pretraining with everyday objects, 10 children aged from 1 to
4 years were given common vocal tact training with a set of three pairs
of arbitrary stimuli of differing shapes; Set 1. Nine children learned
to tact one stimulus as “zog” and the other as “vek” in each pair, and
all passed subsequent pairwise tests for the corresponding listener
behavior to each listener stimulus (i.e., /zog/ and /vek/, respectively).
The children were next trained to clap to one stimulus of Pair 1 and wave
to the other, and all then showed name-consistent transfer of these
behaviors to the stimuli of Pair 2 and Pair 3. Seven children also
were given a test of listener responding to experimenter-modeled
clap and wave gestures, respectively, which they all passed. Four
of the children next participated in a category match-to-sample
test for the Set 1 stimuli; all 4 passed. For each pair of two
additional six-stimuli sets, Set 2 and Set 3, 3 children were
trained to wave to one stimulus and to clap to the other. For
each set, all 3 children showed perfect transfer of the vocal
tacts trained to Set 1, and of listener behavior both to the
auditory stimuli /zog/ and /vek/ and to experimenter-modeled
clap and wave gestures. They also sorted the stimuli perfectly
in category match-to-sample tests for Set 2, Sets 1 and 2 combined,
Set 3, and Sets 1, 2, and 3 combined. The results show that even
in very young children, naming is a powerful means of generating
new category relations among as many as 18 arbitrary stimuli.
Key words: naming, vocal tacting, transfer of function, categorization,
stimulus classes, category match to sample, children