Return to search

The Emergence of Receptive and Expressive Language through Stimulus-Specific Consequences

An important question in teaching language is, what accounts for the emergence of either receptive or expressive labels when teaching only one of them? The teaching procedures in the present study were intended to reproduce the natural development of bidirectional naming in which caregivers comment on the items a child is interacting with and children echo those vocalizations they hear. Thus, the only vocalizations presented by the researcher during teaching occurred after the learner pointed to a specific stimulus, and were specific to the stimulus being targeted. These vocalizations are referred to in this study as stimulus-specific consequences. The purpose of this research was to investigate if the stimulus-specific consequences could become discriminative stimuli for receptive labels, and lead to the emergence of expressive labels. Three studies were conducted, each with four adults. Results demonstrated that using a stimulus-specific consequence during teaching led to receptive labels for all participants, but led to the emergence of expressive labels for only four participants. In other words, bidirectional naming did not occur for the majority of participants. Factors that may improve interrelations between receptive and expressive labels were analyzed, but further evaluations are needed to account for the inconsistent demonstrations of naming.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc1808453
Date05 1900
CreatorsSpurgin, Destiny
ContributorsRosales-Ruiz, Jesus, Toussaint, Karen, Ortu, Daniele
PublisherUniversity of North Texas
Source SetsUniversity of North Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Formatvi, 50 pages, Text
RightsPublic, Spurgin, Destiny, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved.

Page generated in 0.0023 seconds