Instruction-Following and Recombinative Generalization With Prescholars

Abstract

One of the questions of interest in the field of verbal behavior is how people understand and learn to behave according to verbal commands or instructions. Recombinative instructional control refers to following new instructions, whose origins can be traced to previous conditions in which the individual learned to follow instructions that contained elements recombined in the new instructions. Generalization by recombination requires the abstraction of stimulus control units. Although the abstracted units may be the same (hence, identical) in the original stimulus and the new stimulus, the new stimulus as a whole bears no similarity to the original. The experimental design of the present study was based on studies on establishing instructional control and used training matrices to select teaching and testing items. This study investigated whether the overlapping of elements of the pseudo-phrases during teaching favors the following of generalized instructions by recombination. Four participants learned auditory-visual conditional discriminations (Condition 1) among dictated pseudo-phrases and actions related to objects presented by video. Three children followed oral instructions in the instructional control tests, but only one participant followed new recombined sentences. Another four participants learned to follow the experimental instructions via execution of the action related to the object in the simultaneous presence of the auditory stimulus and of the corresponding videotape (Condition 2), and three participants followed the instructions taught and new instructions in the post-test, but did not maintain the performance on the recombinative generalization test. The results suggest the development of stimulus control by subunits; however, it was very fragile and, when it did occur, required systematic training with overlapping elements in different sentences, suggesting the need for additional research on variables that promote recombination.