The authors argue against a purely behavioral definition of praise as verbal reinforcement in favor of the view that praise may serve to undermine, enhance, or have no effect on children's intrinsic motivation, depending on a set of conceptual variables. Provided that praise is perceived as sincere, it is particularly beneficial to motivation when it encourages performance attributions to contr...

Mand training is an essential component of verbal behavior training for any individual who lacks this skill. The current study replicates and extends, with some procedural differences, the work of Hall and Sundberg (1987) by using an interrupted chain procedure to teach mands for missing items to children with autism. The participants were 3 children with autism, ranging between 5 and 8 years o...

We taught manual signs to typically developing infants using a reversal design and caregiver-nominated stimuli. We delivered the stimuli on a time-based schedule during baseline. During the intervention, we used progressive prompting and reinforcement, described by Thompson et al. (2004, 2007), to establish mands. Following sign training, we conducted functional analyses and verified that the s...

of a dissertation Submi~tett in partial fulfilment of therequirements for the ttegreeor Doctor of Philosophy BOSTON UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL

It has been documented that adolescent mothers are less verbally and emotionally responsive in their interactions with their children compared to adult mothers. These less than optimal adolescent mother/infant interactions have been found to affect the child's healthy growth and development. This small study aimed to identify and characterize the frequency of verbal behaviors exhibited in the i...

OBJECTIVE High-performance marine craft personnel (HPMCP) are regularly exposed to vibration and repeated shock (VRS) levels exceeding maximum limitations stated by international legislation. Whereas such exposure reportedly is detrimental to health and performance, the epidemiological data necessary to link these adverse effects causally to VRS are not available in the scientific literature, a...

UNLABELLED We sought to replicate and extend Carroll and Hesse's (1987) study of the acquisition of tacts by including participants with and without developmental disabilities. As in Carroll and Hesse, the present results showed that mand-tact training, rather than tact-only training, led to more rapid acquisition of tacts. Tacting on follow-up tests did not differ. In addition, our results sho...

We evaluated the emergence of untaught second-language skills following directly taught listener and intraverbal responses. Three preschool children were taught first-language (English) listener responses (e.g., "Point to the horse") and second-language (Welsh) intraverbal responses (e.g., "What is horse in Welsh?" [ceffyl]). After intervention, increases in untaught second-language tacts (e.g....

Twenty years ago Michael (1993) refined and extended the concept of the conditioned establishing operation (CEO). With this paper he updated his previous treatment of the topic (Michael, 1982) by providing terminological refinements and conceptually clear descriptions of the reflexive and transitive CEOs. In the 20 years since the publication of that paper there has been an increase in the appl...