grammatical constructions in typical developing children: effects of explicit reinforcement,...

Grammatical Constructions in Typical Developing Children:Effects of Explicit Reinforcement, Automatic Reinforcement

and Parity

Leni Østvik, Svein Eikeseth, and Lars Klintwall,

Oslo and Akershus University College

This study replicated and extended Wright (2006) and Whitehurst, Ironsmith, and Goldfein (1974) byexamining whether preschool aged children would increase their use of passive grammatical voice ratherthan using the more age-appropriate active grammatical construction when the former was modeled byan adult. Results showed that 5 of the 6 participants began using the passive voice after this verbalbehavior had been modeled. For 3 of the participants, this change was large. The change occurred eventhough the adult model explicitly rewarded the participant with praise and stickers for using the activevoice, while providing no praise or stickers for using the passive form that was modeled. For 1participant, the modeling procedure had no effect on use of the passive voice. These results indicate astrong automatic reinforcement effect of achieving parity with the grammatical structures used by adults,compared to the effects of explicit reinforcement by the adult. This might help to explain why childrenacquire grammatical structures prevalent in their language community apparently without explicitinstruction.

Key words: verbal behavior, modeling, automatic reinforcement, parity, children, imitation

Skinner (1957) defined language or verbalbehavior as an operant behavior that is‘‘reinforced through the mediation of otherpersons’’ (p. 2). This refers to a functionalrelationship between behavior of the speakerand conditions in the speaker’s social envi-ronment. For verbal behavior to emerge,operant verbal responses must be reinforcedby the verbal community (Skinner, 1957). Animportant question is how this reinforcementoccurs.

Researchers have observed that childrenseem to acquire many language skills appar-ently in the absence of explicit instruction orexplicit reinforcement, and this has beentaken to contradict Skinner’s analysis ofverbal behavior. Brown and Hanlon (1970)presented data showing that although parentsoften give feedback on some aspects oftheir children’s speech, other aspects are sel-dom instructed. Specifically, parents tend toprovide positive and negative consequences

for the content of the statements (e.g.,naming objects and actions correctly) whileaccepting many errors in grammar andpronunciation.

Although this argument was weakened bythe work of Moerk (1983), who re-analyzedBrown and Hanlon’s (1970) data and showedthat their analysis overlooked many subtlecontingencies of reinforcement, Moerk wasnot able to refute Brown and Hanlon’sgeneral conclusion. There are several exam-ples of grammatical distinctions that cannotplausibly be explained by a history of explicitreinforcement. This is simply because mostadults are unaware of them. That is, adultsrespect certain regularities in word orderwithout being able to tact those regularities(Palmer, 1998).

Chomsky (1980) asserted that a special,innate linguistic device accounted for howgrammar and other important linguistic skillswere acquired in the absence of directinstruction. Although Chomsky’s theorycould explain how children are able to speakgrammatically without explicit reinforce-ment, and proposed that this type of neuralmodule was established through the processof evolution, the theory suffers from a majorproblem: It must address how contingencies ofsurvival can select grammatical distinctions.

This study is based on a thesis submitted by thefirst author to the Graduate Faculty of AkershusUniversity College in partial fulfillment of therequirements for the degree of master of science.

Address correspondence to Svein Eikeseth,Oslo and Akershus University College, P.O. Box4, St.Olavs plass, N-0130 Oslo, Norway. (e-mail:[email protected]).

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior 2012, 28, 73–82

73

What precisely has been selected and whichevolutionary contingences might have selectedthem (Palmer, 1996).

In Skinner’s analysis, the apparent missingsource of reinforcement is automatic rein-forcement, arising from the child conformingto the behavior of a verbal model. Anautomatic reinforcer is related to the responsein such a way that it is produced directlyby the response (Catania, 2007; Novak &Pelaez, 2004; Vaughan & Michael, 1982).In other words, reinforcement that is notmediated by the action of another person.

This can be illustrated with an example. Agirl who hears and sees her big sister whistlewill very likely want to whistle as well. Shewill exhale air and try to shape her mouth thesame way as her big sister does. Initially,she will not be able to produce anythingresembling the whistling of her model, butgradually, after repeated attempts, the firstwhistling sounds appear, and the produc-ed sound is likely a powerful reinforcer. Ifthe girl continues to practice whistling,sometimes producing a good imitation andsometimes not, differential and automaticreinforcement will shape her behavior intoskilled whistling.

This example illustrates how imitation andautomatic reinforcement might play animportant role in the acquisition of verbalbehavior. It must be emphasized that thistype of imitation is not an echoic verbalbehavior, because the verbal response is notproduced in immediate temporal relationshipto the verbal stimulus (Skinner, 1957, p. 164).Skinner discussed these issues in his bookVerbal Behavior (e.g., Skinner, 1957, pp. 58,357), including the following:

Automatic reinforcement may shape thespeaker’s behavior. When, as a listener,a man acquires discriminative responsesto verbal forms, he may reinforcehimself for standard forms and extin-guish deviant behavior. Reinforcingsounds in the child’s environment pro-vide for the automatic reinforcement ofvocal forms. . . . The child can thenreinforce himself automatically for theexecution of vocal patterns which arelater to become part of his verbalbehavior. At this stage the child resem-bles a parrot, which is also automaticallyreinforced when its vocal productionsmatch something heard in the environ-ment. A similar effect may lead to a

special manner of speaking or to parti-cular forms of response characteristic ofthe behavior of others. The effect isoften called identification, but we haveno need to appeal to a special processhere. The listener usually finds certainspeakers particularly reinforcing, eitherbecause what is said is reinforcing, orbecause the speakers are reinforcing inother ways. Parents, favorite employers,persons of prestige, and close friends areexamples. Since, for one reason oranother, it is often reinforcing to hearsuch people speak, it is automaticallyreinforcing to speak as they speak—witha particular intonation, mannerism, orfavorite vocabulary. Terms characteris-tic of the adult repertoire are likely to beused by children with special frequencywhen first acquired. This is not echoicbehavior, because the borrowed re-sponse is not emitted in the propertemporal relation to the verbal stimulus.The borrowing occurs because of theautomatic self-reinforcement generatedby the speaker as a result of his earlierconditioning as a listener. (Skinner,1957, p. 164)

Palmer (1996) used the term parity todescribe how a speaker who is already acompetent listener can detect when he or sheconfirms or deviates from the practice of theverbal community, and hence regulates his orher verbal behavior to match the modeledbehavior. Children usually are competentlisteners before they reach the same level asa speaker, and thus they are able to detecteven slight differences in verbal utterances(Horne & Lowe, 1996). This means thatchildren can tell whether their own utterancesconform or deviate from that of a model. Toachieve parity in ones verbal behavior mightbe a strong generalized reinforcer becauseachieving parity is highly adaptive in mostsituations, and not conforming is oftenpunished by the verbal community (Smith,Michael, & Sundberg, 1996; Sundberg,Michael, Partington, & Sundberg, 1996).

The behavior analytic interpretation oflanguage acquisition is thus based on twotypes of reinforcement. First, verbal behavioris, in part, explicitly reinforced by membersof the verbal community. Second, verbalbehavior is, in part, automatically reinforcedwhen the speaker hears him/herself speakingin accordance with verbal conventions.

To test the parity hypothesis one coulddemonstrate that children can acquire novel

74 Leni Østvik et al.

grammatical conventions in the absence of orin conflict with explicit reinforcement. Giventhat it is unusual in the verbal behavior ofchildren in many languages, the sentencestructure called the ‘‘passive voice’’ is anideal candidate for such a demonstration.

The passive voice is when the object in asentence is put before the agent of the verb,such as in ‘‘Caesar was murdered by Brutus.’’The passive voice construction can be thoughtof as the opposite of the active voiceconstruction, an example of which is ‘‘Brutusmurdered Caesar.’’ Several developmentalstudies have investigated the use of verbs inthe passive voice construction (cf., Allen &Crago, 1996; Demuth, 1989; Marchman,Bates, Burkardt, & Good, 1991; Trosborg,1982). The passive voice debut varies widelyacross different language communities. Forinstance, studies on Inuit children haveindicated that they start using the passivevoice at the age of 2 years (Allen & Crago,1996), while studies on Hebrew-speakingchildren have indicated that they begin usingthe passive voice at the age of 8 (Berman,1985). The explanation for this might be thatthe passive voice is widely used in the Inuitlanguage, while it is quite rare in Hebrew.

Whitehurst, Ironsmith, and Goldfein (1974)investigated the acquisition of the passivevoice as a model for how verbal behavior isacquired. Six normally developing English-speaking children between the ages 4 and5 years were exposed to five sessions duringwhich they listened to an adult describing a setof drawings using the passive voice. Next, thechildren were asked to describe a mix of thesame stimuli and novel but similar stimuli. Allparticipants produced sentences in the passivevoice to describe at least some of the novelstimuli. The experiment included a controlgroup that did not hear the passive voicemodeled by the adult. These children pro-duced no sentences in the passive voice whendescribing any of the drawings.

In a similar study, Wright (2006) included 6English-speaking participants aged 3 and ahalf to 5 and a half years. The participantscompleted 6 phases, the first of which was abaseline phase in which children were askedto describe drawings of two animals involvedin an activity (e.g., a dog brushing a cat).Phases 2 and 4 were modeling phases, duringwhich the experimenter modeled a description

of the first stimulus in pair of drawings, usingthe passive voice (e.g., ‘‘the mouse is beingpulled by the elephant’’ to describe a drawingof an elephant pulling a mouse). The partic-ipant was then asked to describe the seconddrawing in the same pair, which depicted thesame animals and the same action with theroles reversed (i.e., a drawing of a mousepulling an elephant). The experimenter verballypraised use of the active voice but never use ofthe passive voice. Phases 3 and 5 were testphases, during which the participants wereasked to describe novel stimuli without anymodeling. In the sixth phase the participantswere asked to describe the same drawings thathad been used in the baseline phase. The resultsshowed that participants began to use thepassive voice only after the experimenter hadmodeled this verbal behavior. The results alsoindicated that the use of the passive voiceincreased in frequency after repeated modeling.Note that the participants were specifically notreinforced by the experimenter for using thepassive voice, and it might thus be assumed thatthe behavior of the participants was automati-cally reinforced for parity with a model.

The present study was designed to system-atically replicate Wright (2006). This was doneby assessing the extent to which the results ofthe study could be replicated in a new samplefrom a different verbal community (Norwe-gian-speaking children). In addition, the presentstudy assessed the children’s use of the activevoice and undefined verbal behavior in additionto assessing the passive voice. The presentstudy also included explicit tangible conse-quences for the non-modeled behavior, in orderto compare the relative effects of (a) achievingparity with the behavior of a model and (b)tangible consequences.

If it can be shown that children acquirenovel grammatical forms with only manipu-lation of the antecedent stimuli (the modelbehavior) then this would support the behav-ior analytic interpretation of how childrenacquire language (Smith, Michael, & Sund-berg, 1996).

METHOD

Participants

Seven Norwegian-speaking, preschool-aged children participated in the study.

PARITY AND EXPLICIT REINFORCEMENT 75

Inclusion criteria were as follows: (a) chro-nological age between 3 and 6 years, and (b)no reported history of developmental delays.The participants were recruited from thekindergarten they attended and were, accord-ing to the staff, typically developing. Parentsof all children in the kindergarten classreceived information about the experimentand parents of 12 of the 15 children in theclass gave their written consent for partici-pation. The experiment was conducted in onesession lasting for approximately 30 minutes.All children with parental consent whoattended the kindergarten at the day of theexperiment participated. The participants’age and sex is shown in Table 1. If aparticipant in any way expressed or indicatedthat he or she wanted to quit, the experimentwas terminated and the participant wasreturned to the other children with the toyand stickers earned.

Setting and Materials

The experiment was conducted in a roomat the kindergarten. The room was usedfor music lessons and contained a piano,a blackboard, a table, several chairs, and asofa. Placed on the table were stickers, aplastic sheet (14 3 19 cm) with 20 dots onwhich the stickers could be placed, an mp3-recording device, and three sets of drawingson cards (10 3 15 cm). The first two sets ofdrawings—the test set and the training set—included 20 drawings each (40 pictures intotal). Each set of 20 drawings consisted of10 pairs. Every pair of drawings depicted twoanimals involved in an activity. In one of thedrawings in the pair, animal X was doingsomething to animal Y, and in the otherdrawing in the pair, animal Y was doing the

same thing to animal X (see Figure 1). Thethird set, the generalization set, consisted of17 pictures depicting animals involved in anactivity. The activities were the same as inthe training and test and training sets, but oneof the animals was substituted with anotherone (also taken from the test or training sets)(see Figure 2). The drawings in all sets werethe same as those used in Wright (2006),except for the generalization set. For this set,new drawings were made based on thedescriptions from Wright.

Dependent Variable and Reliability

The dependent variable was the verbalbehavior of the children, coded into threecategories; passive voice, active voice, andundefined, as follows:

Passive voice was defined as any of thefollowing sentences: (a) A sentence in thepassive voice (i.e., X is being done some-thing to by Y, e.g., ‘‘the elephant is beingpushed by the mouse’’) in which both subjectand object in the drawing are named correctly;

Table 1Participants’ Sex and Chronological Age

Participant Sex Age (year, months)

Eskil M 4,6Henny F 4,6Simon M 4,0Amanda F 4,3David M 3,5Frode M 5,5

Figure 1. A pair of pictures from the training set.Picture A would be described in the active voiceas ‘‘The elephant is pulling the mouse.’’ Inpassive voice A would be described as: ‘‘Themouse is being pulled by the elephant.’’ Picture Bwould be described in the active voice as ‘‘Themouse is pulling the elephant’’ and in the passivevoice as ‘‘The elephant is being pulled by themouse.’’


(b) a sentence that is structured in the passivevoice, but the speaker reverses the naming ofthe subject and object; (c) a sentence that isstructured in the passive voice, but the sameanimal is named as both subject and object; and(d) a sentence that is structured in the passivevoice, but in which the actor is omitted. If theparticipant named the animal as a similar butdifferent species, such as naming a zebra as ahorse or naming a moose as a deer, this wasconsidered correct. This definition of thepassive voice is identical to the one used byWright et al. (2006).

Active voice was defined as any of thefollowing sentences: (a) A sentence contain-ing the active voice (e.g., ‘‘the mouse ispushing the elephant’’) in which both subjectand object in the drawing is named correctly;(b) a sentence that is structured in the activevoice, but the speaker reverses the naming ofthe subject and object; (c) a sentence that isstructured in the active voice, but the sameanimal is named as both subject and object;and (d) a sentence that is structured in theactive voice, but in which the actor isomitted.

Undefined Verbal Behavior. Any otherverbal behavior or lack thereof was scored asundefined. The two latter categories (Activeand Undefined) were not used by Wrightet al. (2006).

Inter-rater agreement was calculated for allparticipants using the records of two inde-pendent observers. Point-by-point agreementwas calculated by dividing the number ofagreements by the sum of agreements anddisagreements and multiplying the outcomeby 100. The mean total inter-rater agreementwas 98.9% (range 98.6% to 100.0%).

Procedure

The experiment started when the partici-pant was seated in the sofa in front of thetable and across from the experimenter. Theparticipant was given a toy and askedwhether he or she would like to stay andplay a game and earn stickers. If the childpreferred to leave the experiment, he or shewould still get the toy. All participantsstayed, and they were shown the stickersthat could be earned during the experiment.A total of 20 stickers could be earned. Exceptduring the baseline phase, when no feedbackwas given, stickers and praise were deliveredcontingent upon use of the active voice todescribe the drawings. Praise or stickerswere never given when the participant usedthe modeled passive voice, or when theparticipant produced an undefined response.Instead, whenever a participant used thepassive voice or produced an undefinedresponse, the experimenter said in a neutralvoice, ‘‘Now let’s look at the next drawing,’’and went on to the next stimulus.

Initially, the experimenter told the participantthat he or she would be shown some drawings,and that the participant and the experimenterwould take turns describing them. Throughoutall 6 phases, each participant was shown a totalof 74 pictures. The experimenter always usedthe passive voice to describe the stimuli. Atthe end of the experiment, participants who hadnot received all 20 stickers were given theremaining stickers.

Phase 1: Baseline using the test set. Whenthe experiment began, the participant wasgiven the following instructions: ‘‘I wouldlike you to tell me about some drawings that Iwill show you.’’ The experimenter showed

Figure 2. A pair of pictures from the generaliza-tion set. These drawings depict the same activityas those in Figure 1. The elephant in drawing Ahas been replaced with a panda bear, and themouse in drawing B has been replaced with asheep.


the first stimulus in each pair of the test set,and gave the instruction: ‘‘Tell me about thispicture.’’ If participants only named theanimals on the picture, the experimentersaid, ‘‘What are they doing?’’ If participantsdid not answer at all, the experimenter said,‘‘Do you know what these animals arecalled?’’ and then named the animals forthe child. A total of 10 drawings were shownduring baseline (saving the second drawingin each pair for the final generalizationphase), and the experimenter gave onlyneutral feedback (such as humming andgiving a slight nod) regardless of whatanswers the participant produced.

Phase 2: Modeling the passive voice usingthe training set. During the second phase, thepassive voice was modeled. First, the exper-imenter presented the participant with thefirst drawing of the training set and describedit by using the passive voice. For example,the experimenter showed the participant thedrawing exhibited in the top panel ofFigure 1 and said: ‘‘The mouse is pulled bythe elephant.’’ The picture was held in frontof the child for 10 seconds after which theexperimenter said, ‘‘Great, you waited yourturn,’’ and removed the picture. If theparticipant tried to imitate the experimenterduring the 10-second-interval, the experi-menter told the participant not to sayanything before it was his/her turn. Aftertwo seconds, the experimenter presented thesecond stimulus in the pair (see lower panelof Figure 1) and told the participant; ‘‘Nowit’s your turn, tell me about this picture.’’ All20 drawings in the training set were present-ed in this phase; one drawing of the pair wasmodeled by the experimenter, whereas theother drawing of the pair was described bythe participants.

Praise and stickers were presented contin-gent on the participant waiting his or herturn and using the active voice when describ-ing the drawings. The experimenter neverpraised or delivered any stickers if theparticipant used the passive voice, nor didthe experimenter in any way indicate that thepassive voice was the sought-after response.

Phase 3: Testing the passive voice usingthe generalization set. During Phase 3, theuse of the active and passive voices inresponse to the pictures in the generalizationset was assessed. The participants were

shown a drawing and given the instructions:‘‘Tell me about this picture.’’ The experi-menter waited 10 seconds for the participantto respond. After a 2-second-pause the nextstimulus was presented. Rewards were pro-vided by the same criteria as described inPhase 2. The participant was shown a total of17 pictures during this phase.

Phase 4: Modeling the passive voice usingthe training set. Phase 4 was identical toPhase 2.

Phase 5: Testing the passive voice usingthe generalization set. Phase 5 was identicalto Phase 3.

Phase 6: Testing the passive voice usingthe test set. During Phase 6, the use of theactive and passive voices in response todrawings from the test set was assessed. Theexperimenter presented the second (andnovel) drawing from the pairs in the test setand asked participants to describe it. Eachparticipant described a total of 10 pictures.The procedure for reinforcement was thesame as in the other phases.

Procedural Integrity

The experimenter kept, during the entireexperiment, a laminated sheet with a de-scription of the experimental procedure andthe instructions to be given to the partici-pants. This was done to ensure that theexperiment was carried out according to theprotocol. All drawings had the correctdescription, in the passive voice, printed onthe back side of the card. This ensured acorrect passive voice modeling of the draw-ings during the training phases, and helpedthe experimenter provide correct feedbackand correct scoring of the participants’responses.

To assess procedural integrity, the audiorecordings of Phase 2 for the secondparticipant, Phase 3 for the third participantand Phase 4 for the fourth participant werescored for procedural integrity. Scoring wasbased on whether the experimenter producedthe correct instructions to the participant inthe beginning of each phase, whether theexperimenter described the drawings inaccordance with what was written on theback of each picture, whether the experi-menter gave the correct instructions, andwhether the experimenter gave feedback in


accordance with the contingency describedabove. Procedural integrity was found to be97%, containing only one error: once aparticipant was given praise following useof the passive voice.

RESULTS

One participant in the study left the exper-imental room after completing baseline, andhence was excluded from data analysis. Theremaining six children completed the experi-ment in its entirety. Percentage use of passivevoice across all phases for each participant isshown in Figure 3. As can be seen, noparticipant used the passive voice duringbaseline.

Results for Eskil are shown in Figure 3and Table 2. During baseline, Eskil used thepassive voice on 0% of the trials (he used100% active voice). In the subsequenttraining phase, he used passive voice on80% of the trials (20% active voice). In thefirst test phase (Phase 3) the passive voicewas used in 53% of the trials (41% activevoice). In the second training phase (Phase 4)the passive voice was used on 100% of thetrials, and in the next test phase (Phase 5) thepassive voice was used for 59% of the trials(35% active voice), and in the final general-ization phase the participant used the passivevoice in 70% of the trials (30% active voice).The results for Simon and Frode were similar

to that of Eskil (see Figure 3 and Table 2),and hence, the verbal behavior of Eskil,Simon, and Frode appeared to be affected bythe modeling condition.

David, by contrast, failed to use thepassive voice throughout the experiment(see Figure 3). As shown in Table 2, Davidused the active voice on 40% of the trialsduring baseline, and undefined respondingduring the remaining 60% of the baselinetrials. During the two subsequent trainingphases (2 and 4), David used the active voiceon 80% of the trials, and during the finalgeneralization phase he used the active voiceon 100% of the trials. As can be seen inFigure 3 and Table 2 the results of Hennyand Amanda were similar to that of David,though both Henny and Amanda began usingsome use of the passive voice. Hence, theverbal behavior of David appeared unaffect-ed by the modeling condition, whereas themodeling condition had some effect on theverbal behavior of Henny and Amanda.

DISCUSSION

This study replicated and extended Wright(2006) and Whitehurst et al. (1974) by exam-ining whether preschool-aged children wouldincrease their use of the passive grammaticalvoice when it was modeled by an adult, ratherthan using the active grammatical construction,which was explicitly reinforced.

Figure 3. Percentage of responses in the passive voice across phases for each participant.


Results showed that 5 of the 6 participantsbegan using the passive voice after thisverbal behavior had been modeled. For 3 ofthe children this change was large andpersistent into the final generalization phase.The modeling procedure had a limited effecton the verbal behavior of 2 of the partici-pants, who continued to use the active voiceon most of the trials though they sometimesalso used the passive voice. Finally, 1participant never used the passive voice.During baseline he used 60% undefinedresponding and 40% active voice, and duringthe final generalization phase he used 100%active voice. Hence, he increased the use ofthe active voice (rather than the modeledpassive voice) over the course of theexperiment.

In the final generalization phase of theexperiment, the participants were asked todescribe drawings in which the previousanimals and actions were presented in newcombinations. The drawings in the general-ization set were different from the drawing inthe training and test sets as follows: Thetraining and test sets consisted of pairs ofanimal X doing something to animal Y, andthen with the roles reversed. The generaliza-tion set consisted of animals and actions fromthe earlier sets but with a new object animal.The object animals was also taken from thetraining and test sets, but had not beencombined with that agent animal or action.During the final generalization phase, 4 of theparticipants generated new sentences in thepassive voice, suggesting that the increase orestablishment of the passive voice was amatter of learning an autoclitic or intraverbalframe, rather than simple imitation.

The main question of the study was toinvestigate whether children could learn anovel verbal behavior with the manipulationof antecedents only, not consequences. Theincrease of the use of the passive voice isindicative that this was the case, but islimited by the possible explanation that thechildren already had this grammatical framein their repertoire and that the modeling onlyincreased the strength of that frame. Simplyput, it cannot be determined empirically fromthe present study whether the increase inthe use of the passive voice was a matterof acquisition of novel behavior, or only amatter of strengthening existing verbal be-havior. Either way, the results suggest thatthe verbal behavior of children is affected bythe verbal behavior of a speaker, presumablythrough automatic reinforcement and parity.

A limitation of this study was that it lackeda control group. Hence, maturation andreactivity of the probes may be confoundingvariables that cannot be ruled out empirical-ly. However, it is unlikely that maturationcould account for the change observed in theparticipant’s verbal behavior, since the ex-periment was conducted in one session, andsince all participants failed to use the passivevoice during baseline despite varying in agefrom 3 years, 5 months to 5 years, 5 months.Also, it is unlikely that reactivity of testingcould account for the acquisition of thepassive voice since the participants wererewarded for using the active voice. Also,Whitehurst et al. (1974) included a no-treatment control group in their study, andnone of the participants in the control groupused the passive voice at any point over thecourse of the experiment. This observed

Table 2Participants’ Use of Active Voice and Undefined Verbal Behavior Across Phases as

Percentage of Trials

Participants

Active voice/Undefined verbal behavior

Baseline Modeling Test Modeling Test Generalization

Eskil 100/0 20/0 41/6 0/0 35/6 30/0Henny 80/20 80/0 65/0 70/0 76/0 80/0Simon 100/0 60/0 82/0 20/0 18/0 10/0Amanda 80/20 100/0 94/0 80/0 6/0 100/0David 40/60 80/20 35/65 80/20 65/35 100/0Frode 80/20 30/10 82/6 10/0 65/12 40/0


stability of the active voice occasioned thedesign of the present study. Alternatively,a single-case design, such as a multiplebaseline design, could have been used.

Interestingly, the 3 participants for whomthe modeling condition had the largest effectwere on average 6 months older than theother 3 children. It is possible that for thesechildren, the automatic reinforcement pro-duced by achieving parity had higher valencethan the praise and stickers given contingenton use of the active voice. For the youngerchildren, the opposite could have been thecase. However, it should be noted that noreinforcer assessment was conducted on thestickers or the praise. It is possible, thoughunlikely, that neither stickers nor praisefunctioned as reinforcers for some of theparticipating children. Another possibilityis that delivery of praise and reinforcerscontingent on turn-taking lead to satiation forthese stimuli as reinforcers.

Future studies could investigate the extentto which participants would use the passivevoice, after modeling, on novel drawings inwhich neither subjects nor activities had beenpreviously modeled. Future studies couldalso model other grammatical frames thanthe passive voice. This could be frames thatdo not exist or are extremely unusual, such as‘‘Murdered by Brutus, Caesar’’ or ‘‘BrutusCaesar murdered.’’ Another possibility is tomodel an artificial pronunciation of a famil-iar word. If such artificial verbal responsescan be established in the verbal behavior ofchildren, this would suggest that certainaspects of language indeed can be learnedthrough automatic reinforcement and parity.

This study highlights the need to considerboth explicit social reinforcement as well asautomatic reinforcement when studying theacquisition of verbal behavior.

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