Abstract
The form of a verbal response allows for reinforcement mediation and language transmission across cultures. Reinforcement, in turn, plays a decisive role in learning verbal forms. The present work addresses methodological limitations of previous studies, providing further evidence of the role of automatic reinforcement in achieving parity with vocal models. In the first experiment, 4 preschool-age children heard the experimenter describe drawings of different actions in the passive voice. Participants were then asked to describe analogous drawings. They used the passive voice after the model was presented and continued to do so even when preferred explicit consequences followed diverging descriptions (i.e., in the active voice). To further investigate the effects of explicit reinforcement and of the passive-voice model, in Experiment 2, we altered the number of trials with explicit reinforcement and with the model. Three of four participants used the passive voice to describe the drawings, despite greater exposure to explicit consequences following descriptions diverging from the model.
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Notes
The equivalent in Norwegian was “Z blir Y-t av X” (Østvik, 2009).
For a list with all the descriptions in Brazilian Portuguese and the correspondent English translations, please contact the first author.
Detailed analysis of each occurrence can be requested from the first author.
During pilot studies, we found that participants started describing single-subject actions using the uncommon object-subject-verb construct after the experimenter’s model (dubbed the Yoda model).
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Funding
The authors wish to thank So-Young Yoon, formerly of the F. S. Keller School in Yonkers, New York, for drawing the first and second sets of pictures used in the present and previous studies and Dr. Svein Eikeseth for sharing these sets; Karina C. Cinel for drawing the third set of stimuli; Lívia Benatti, Fanny Silveira, André Ferreira, and Fernanda Calixto for assistance during data collection and analysis; and São Paulo Research Foundation for its financial support through a master’s scholarship for the first author (no. 13/24761-0). A portion of this article is based on a thesis submitted by the first author, under the supervision of the second author, to the graduate program in psychology of the Universidade Federal de São Carlos in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the master’s degree in psychology.
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Rodrigo Dal Ben and Celso Goyos conceived the study and were involved in experimental design. Rodrigo Dal Ben acquired and analyzed the data, with interpretation help from Celso Goyos. Rodrigo Dal Ben drafted the article, with revisions contributed by Celso Goyos. The manuscript has not been submitted to any other journal and has not been published previously.
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There are no potential conflicts of interests, financial or not, regarding the research. Rodrigo Dal Ben declares that he has no conflict of interest. Celso Goyos declares that he has no conflict of interest.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The institutional research ethics committee of the Universidade Federal de São Carlos approved the research (approval no. 31644714.2.0000.5504).
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Concerning the manuscript “Further evidence of automatic reinforcement effects on verbal form”, the authors declare that:
1. Rodrigo Dal Ben and Celso Goyos conceived the study and were involved in experimental design. Rodrigo Dal Ben acquired and analyzed the data, with interpretation help from Celso Goyos. Rodrigo Dal Ben drafted the paper, with revisions contributed by Celso Goyos.
2. The manuscript has not been submitted to any other journal;
3. The manuscript has not been published previously;
4. There are no potential conflicts of interests, financial or not, regarding the research:
Rodrigo Dal Ben declares that he has no conflict of interest;
Celso Goyos declares that he has no conflict of interest;
5. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
6. The institutional research ethics committee of the Universidade Federal de São Carlos approved the research (approval number 31644714.2.0000.5504) and parents signed an informed consent authorizing the participation of their children, who agreed to take part at the onset of each experimental session.
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Dal Ben, R., Goyos, C. Further evidence of automatic reinforcement effects on verbal form. Analysis Verbal Behav 35, 74–84 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40616-018-0104-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40616-018-0104-3