ON THE ROLE OF BIDIRECTIONAL INTRAVERBAL NAMING ON EQUIVALENCE CLASS FORMATION

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to establish tacts and intraverbals to evaluate whether emergent matching-to-sample (MTS) and intraverbal responding occurred, in accordance with the emergence of intraverbal bidirectional naming (I-BiN) and the formation of equivalence classes. This study replicates and extends the work of Ma et al. (2016) by employing a one-to-many (OTM) training structure, instead of a linear series (LS) training structure. In addition, the study included sorting post-tests and a social validity survey. Eight adult participants underwent MTS pre-tests, followed by tact training of experimental stimuli and testing for emergent listener responses. Then, intraverbal training (A’B’/A’C’) was introduced before conducting MTS post-tests and I-BiN post-tests, as well as sorting post-tests. A post-experimental interview and a social validity survey completed the study. The main finding indicated that training of baseline intraverbal relations using an OTM training structure likely facilitated the establishment of new conditional ties in accordance with the emergence of I-BiN towards the experimental stimuli and the formation of equivalence classes. All participants reported using verbal mediation strategies, such as tacts and intraverbals established during training and testing, as well as self-generated tacts and intraverbals.