Effects of Collateral Response Requirements and Exemplar Training on Listener Training Outcomes in Children

Abstract

We evaluated the effects of collateral response requirements during listener training on the emergence of vocal foreign-language tacts and intraverbals among 4- and 5-year-old children. In Experiment 1, participants were first exposed to auditory-visual match-to-sample training without collateral response requirements. Four participants did not perform to criterion in probes for derived vocal responses, and were exposed to a two-phase intervention that involved adding echoic and native-language tact requirements to match-to-sample trials. Performance did not improve as a result of the intervention. However, all participants passed tact probes after receiving direct tact and intraverbal training with a subset of the stimuli, and two of four participants also passed the intraverbal probes. Experiment 2 addressed potential limitations of Experiment 1 with three additional participants, but collateral response requirements still failed to affect the emergence of tacts and intraverbals.