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THE DEVELOPMENT OF FUNCTIONAL AND EQUIVALENCE CLASSES IN HIGH‐FUNCTIONING AUTISTIC CHILDREN: THE ROLE OF NAMING
Author(s) -
Eikeseth Svein,
Smith Tristram
Publication year - 1992
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.1992.58-123
Subject(s) - psychology , stimulus (psychology) , equivalence relation , cognitive psychology , functional equivalence , stimulus control , developmental psychology , equivalence (formal languages) , equivalence class (music) , visual perception , perception , mathematics , neuroscience , linguistics , philosophy , discrete mathematics , pure mathematics , nicotine
The development of functional and equivalence classes was studied in four high‐functioning, preschool‐aged autistic children. Initially, all subjects failed to demonstrate match‐to‐sample relations indicative of stimulus equivalence among two three‐member classes of visual stimuli. Then, 2 subjects showed emergence of those relations after they were taught to assign the same name to all members in each class. Next, subjects were taught names for new stimuli outside the match‐to‐sample format. On subsequent match‐to‐sample tests, 2 subjects demonstrated untrained conditional relations among the stimuli given a common name. New, unnamed stimuli were then related via match‐to‐sample training to stimuli from sets of named stimuli. Tests for emergent conditional relations between the new unnamed stimuli and the named stimuli yielded positive results for 1 subject and somewhat mixed results for 3 subjects. Finally, without naming, 2 subjects developed stimulus equivalence among two new three‐member classes of visual stimuli. These data suggest that naming may remediate failures to develop untrained conditional relations, some of which are indicative of stimulus equivalence.