for evaluating and teaching individuals with disabilities (e.g., alternative and augmentative communication, assessment of non-verbal humans, etc.).
TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH Perception, Discrimination, and Equivalence 4A: Development of Symbolic Function in Infants
Institute researchers have already made significant advances in methods to work with this challenging population (e.g., Gil, Oliveira, & McIlvane, 2011). Methods to study simple and conditional discriminations have been developed to study infants as young as 10 months. These are remarkable methodological advances that have permitted to investigate infants’ capacities at much earlier ages than usually reported in the literature. For instance, simple discrimination learning has been found with infants from 10 months old (Gil, Sousa, & de Souza, 2011; Sousa, Garcia, & Gil, in press). From this age, children also showed reversal learning (Sousa & Gil, in press) and learning sets, i.e., learning to learn, meaning that infants show progressively faster learning as series of similar discriminations are acquired, and ostensive pairings were effective to teach discriminations to infants from 15 months (Sousa, doctoral dissertation). A recent breakthrough is the demonstration of stimulus equivalence with children between 24 and 27 months (Almeida, ongoing doctoral dissertation). Several studies investigated responding by exclusion in infants (see also section 4B). Sertori (master thesis) was able to teach auditory-visual conditional relations by exclusion to 13 month-old children. Moreover, in this study, infants learned to respond to a “blank� choice (indicating that the other choice was not appropriate). Thus, it was possible to demonstrate that the infants learned both the choice to be selected and the choice to be rejected in two-choice conditional discriminations. These studies investigated capabilities that presumably are involved in language acquisition. A study by Cruvinel and Hubner (2013) conducted a longitudinal investigation of language acquisition in one infant from 17 to 24 months, recording the frequency of different types of verbal relations, clarifying the developmental sequence and effects of the interaction with the caregivers. 4B: Fast Mapping Strategies in Toddler-Age Children
Several recent studies investigated matching-to-sample by exclusion and emergent mapping with names, adjectives, and verbs in 24- to 36-month-old children. A large pool of more than 80 children virtually always responded by exclusion, either with names, adjectives, or verbs, thus extending fast mapping (usually investigated with object-name relations) to other kinds of verbal relations. A single exclusion trial, however, does not necessarily lead to learning
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ANNUAL REPORT # 5 (2013-2014) Relational Learning and Symbolic Functioning: Basic and Applied Research