Stimulus Equivalence and Receptive Reading by Hearing-Impaired Preschool Children

Abstract

In a conditional discrimination task, two 5-year-old, profoundly hearing-impaired preschool children were taught relations between 20 manually signed words, pictures of the words, and their printed forms. One student was taught relations between manually signed words and their pictures and between manually signed words and their printed forms. For this student, no relations were taught between the pictures and the printed words; however, testing showed that these relations emerged after the prior training. A second student was taught relations between manually signed words and their pictures and the pictures and their printed words. For this student, no relations were taught between the manually signed words and the printed words; however, testing showed that these relations emerged after the prior training. The results replicate and extend findings by Sidman (1971) to profoundly hearing-impaired preschool children.