Premium
THE NATURE OF CONTROL BY SPOKEN WORDS OVER VISUAL STIMULUS SELECTION 1
Author(s) -
Dixon Lois S.
Publication year - 1977
Publication title -
journal of the experimental analysis of behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1938-3711
pISSN - 0022-5002
DOI - 10.1901/jeab.1977.27-433
Subject(s) - stimulus (psychology) , stimulus control , psychology , spoken word , spoken language , communication , speech recognition , audiology , cognitive psychology , computer science , natural language processing , linguistics , neuroscience , medicine , philosophy , poetry , nicotine
Eight retarded adolescents were trained to select one (a trained S+) of two visual stimuli in response to a spoken word (a trained word). Two different visual stimuli alternated randomly as the S‐. To determine if the spoken word was merely a temporal discriminative stimulus for when to respond, or if it also specified which visual stimulus to select, the subjects were given intermittent presentations of untrained (novel) spoken words. All subjects consistently selected the trained S+ in response to the trained spoken word and selected the previous S‐ in response to the untrained spoken words. It was hypothesized that the subjects were responding away from the trained S+ in response to untrained spoken words, and control by untrained spoken words would not be observed when the trained S+ was not present. The two visual S‐ stimuli selected on trials of untrained spoken words were presented simultaneously. The untrained spoken words presented on these trials no longer controlled stimulus selections for seven subjects. The results supported the hypothesis that previous control by spoken words was due to responding away from the trained S+ in response to untrained spoken words.