| Abstract: Naming has been identified as a Verbal Behavior Developmental Capability allowing individuals to acquire language incidentally. However, a name is but an arbitrary relation given to a set of essential stimulus characteristics. While many studies have demonstrated the emergence of untaught listener responses, tacts and impure tacts as a function of contrived experiences, few if any have looked at the emergence of untaught intraverbals as a measure of incidental language acquistion. The initial two experiments used a delayed multiple probe design to conduct analysis on the relationship between naming experiences and the emergence of untaught listener, tact, and intraverbals. In each of the experiments, 12 participants, identified as neuro typical, ages 4-5 were used. In Experiment 1, upon the emergence of an untaught accurate tact, all participants emitted the correlated untaught intraverbal, identifying the color of the stimulus when the stimulus was not present. In Experiment 2, additional stimuli characteristics were controlled for and the same relation between untaught tact and intraverbals, as identified in Experiment 1, was observed. In Experiment 3 language acquisition was measured utilizing a non-concurrent stimulus presentation in which the auditory stimulus was presented after the visual stimulus was removed and two distractor trials presented. Through a delayed multiple probe design, results for all six participants, demonstrated a multiple exemplar intervention was successful in establishing language acquisition in the absence of the visual stimulus. As we seek to discover key and necessary sources of language expansion, the acquisition of novel intraverbals may be an important piece. Conditioned seeing may account for these untaught responses as the procedures used may have required the particpants to emit private supplementary stimuli in order to respond accurantely to novel intraverbals. If more than a name is being acquired, it may be beneficial to separate this Verbal Behavior Developmental Capability from other research on Naming, as Incidental Language Acquisition. |