| Abstract: Contingency adduction occurs when repertoires learned under one context are recruited by contingencies in another context for which the repertoires were not originally learned. Contingency adduction may be more likely to occur if critical element skills that comprise related behavior repertoires occur at high frequencies, an indicator of behavioral fluency. The current investigation tested the extent to which a frequency building intervention impacted the emergence of an untaught compound skill. In particular, the intervention set out to increase the frequency of letter-sound skills, while the emergence of untaught consonant-vowel-consonant words were evaluated each day. Elements of the frequency building condition consisted of letters and words presented on PowerPoint slides, timed practice, and feedback. The experimenter applied a multiple baseline design with a baseline condition consisting of a series of 30-second frequency building trials with no feedback provided. The intervention consisted of 10, 30-second frequency building trials immediately followed by 30 seconds of feedback. A phonemic awareness instruction condition had each participant experience a model-lead-test procedure until each participant could demonstrate 100% accuracy per target item. Findings indicate that contingency adduction occurred (i.e., untaught consonant-vowel-consonant words emerged) for all three participants, especially when phonemic awareness was present in their repertoires. |