Establishing Derived Manding for Specific Amounts with Three Children: An Attempt at Synthesizing Skinner’s Verbal Behavior with Relational Frame Theory

Abstract

Participants were 2 typically developing children, aged 9 and 10 years, and 1 child, aged 4 years, with a reported severe speech delay. Five specific mand functions were trained such that participants learned to mand for the delivery or removal of tokens to the value of −2, −1, 0, +1, and +2, by presenting an arbitrary stimulus (A1, A2, A3, A4, and A5, respectively). The A stimuli were then incorporated into a series of interrelated conditional discriminations (A1–B1, B1–C1, A2–B2, B2–C2, A3–B3, B3–C3, A4–B4, B4–C4, A5–B5, B5–C5). Subsequent tests determined if participants derived 5 specific mands, presenting C1, C2, C3, C4, and C5 as mands for −2, −1, 0, +1 and +2 tokens. Three participants demonstrated derived manding, and derived manding altered in accordance with newly trained relations across two reversal procedures.