Association for Behavior Analysis International

Anna Ingeborg Petursdottir received her Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. She is currently an associate professor of psychology and chair of the psychology department at Texas Christian University (TCU), where she teaches courses and supervises doctoral students in Experimental Psychology. She also holds an appointment as a part-time lecturer at Reykjavik University. Anna is a previous editor of The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, a previous associate editor of JABA and a current associate editor of JEAB. She is president-elect of Division 25 of the American Psychological Association, a board member of the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, a member of the ABAI science board, and a past president of the Texas Association for Behavior Analysis. Anna’s research encompasses both basic and applied interests and focuses primarily on verbal behavior acquisition and the relationship between verbal behavior and derived stimulus relations.

Language and communication skills are a major focus of early intervention programs for young children diagnosed with ASD who present with language delays. Based on typical developmental sequences, early curricula emphasized establishing language comprehension before moving to production; operationalized as completing receptive programs prior to the corresponding expressive programs. By contrast, more recent approaches that are rooted in behavioral accounts of language are more likely to recommend mixing receptive and expressive instruction. In this presentation, I will review old and new evidence suggesting that for many learners, the most efficient way to establish both comprehension and production is to focus on expressive instruction, particularly on the verbal operant termed the tact. This may be the case even when the primary goal is to establish another verbal operant, such as the intraverbal. I will present some hypotheses as to why the empirical evidence seems to favor this approach, along with relevant data. Likewise, I will review what is known about potential prerequisites for tact instruction to result in the establishment of additional speaker and listener behavior, and which questions remain unanswered.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.