Instructional Control with Preschoolers and Stimulus Equivalence

The stimulus equivalence paradigm is a behavioral model to study meaning. This study extends work that has used the equivalence paradigm to study the meaning of instructions. Our goal was to teach two sets of conditional discriminations to preschoolers, one including verbs and the other including nouns, and evaluate the formation of equivalence classes and instruction-following. Four preschool children participated. Initially, an instructional control pretest (simple instructions, verb-object type) was presented visually or orally (dictated or visual stimuli). Next, children learned AB and AC conditional relations between familiar objects (A), representative pictures (B), and abstract pictures (C). BC and CB equivalence tests checked for equivalence class formation. Finally, the children learned DE and DF conditional discriminations among verbs (D), action videos (E), and abstract pictures (F), and were tested in EF and FE relations. All children formed equivalence classes. In the instructional control pretest, all children followed most of the oral instructions, but not the visual instructions. In the posttest, two participants correctly followed all the visual instructions. After a remedial training, the other two participants also followed the visual instructions. This finding is a demonstration of the transfer of the instructional function exerted by the dictated words (verb-noun) to abstract pictures through the formation of the two independent equivalence classes.