Association for Behavior Analysis International

Behavioral analyses of the stimulus control for the phenomena characterized as bi-directional address critical issues in verbal behavioral development, verbal behavior, and relational responding. Laboratories have investigated naming as (a) derived relations, (b) its effects on other derived relations, (c) as well as the identification of experiences that contribute to the onset of naming as a behavioral developmental cusp. We present the perspectives of four laboratories on bi-directional naming.

The target audience consists of all behavior analysts with a theoretical and/or practical interest in the emergence, "generativity," or "explosion" of verbal skills in young children, and in how the basic behavioral principles can be utilized in teaching children with language delays more effectively.

Naming types have been identified as verbal behavior developmental cusps that result from a history of experiences. Different types of naming have been identified according to the stimuli controlling stimuli including: (a) naming involving actions, (b) additional auditory stimuli, (c) exclusion conditions, (d) familiar and unfamiliar stimuli, and (e) additional auditory stimuli. Some children who do not demonstrate naming can do so after several interventions and their educational prognosis improves as a result.

Humans often solve problems by engaging in a variety of strategies, some of which involve talking to themselves. This requires that they speak with understanding. Bidirectional Naming (BiN) is the term used (in behavior analysis) to refer to the ability to react as a listener to one's own speaker behavior. In this talk, I will describe basic, translational, and applied studies supporting the role of BiN in the development of complex skills such as categorization and analogical reasoning. Evidence for the role of BiN as a problem solving strategy comes from positive performances on complex matching-to-sample tasks after the use of verbal behavior training alone, and also from spontaneous vocalizations on the specific verbal strategies utilized by participants during or after task completion.

In the paper that gave rise to the study of stimulus equivalence, Sidman (1971) used the terms name/naming to generically designate responses under the discriminative control of pictures and printed words. In Skinnerian terms, he was referring to tact and textual relations. In Sidman's study, these discriminated operants emerged as a by-product of learning stimulus-stimulus relations. Although the response in a tact (or textual behavior) occurs under the control of a specific stimulus, if that stimulus is a member of an equivalence class, this implies that the response comes under the control of the class as a whole. The class, in turn, involves at least the primary item or environmental aspect, the spoken word/s, which was/were conventionally related to this item by the learner's verbal community [in the tact], and the corresponding printed word/s [in textual behavior]. Consequently, the learning history established listening and speaking behaviors in the same individual. This presentation will illustrate the formation of equivalence classes and the development of listening comprehension, tact, and textual behaviors in a sample of deaf children with cochlear implants.