Emergent Relations between Discriminative Stimuli, Responses, and Consequences in Intraverbals

We explored the emergence of relations between stimuli learned as discriminative, responses, and consequences with intraverbals. In Experiment 1, five 9- and 10-year-old children learned intraverbals that related a country (A) with a city (B)—e.g., “Name a city of Switzerland”; “Davos”—and that country with a predator animal (C). Correct responses were followed by saying the name of a feature of the city (T) or saying an animal preyed by the predator (U), respectively. The emergence of BC and CB intraverbals that relate the cities and the predators and that of intraverbals that relate the specific consequences to the cities (T-B and U-B) and to the prey animals (T-C and U-C) was probed with no differential consequences. All five children demonstrated the emergence of BC, CB, U-B, and U-C and four children also demonstrated the emergence of T-B and T-C. In Experiment 2, a simpler procedure that controlled a possible extraneous factor, was used with seven 7- and 8-year old children and they also demonstrated emergence. Thus, the emergence of verbal relations with elements taught as discriminative stimuli, responses, and consequences was demonstrated.