EFFECTS OF SEQUENTIAL OR SIMULTANEOUS TACT INSTRUCTION ON THE ACQUISITION OF A SMALL VOCABULARY IN TWO FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the effect of tact instruction (ie, naming pictures) in two foreign languages (English and Spanish), performed simultaneously or sequentially, on the emergence of bidirectional intraverbal responses (ie, translation) between the two foreign languages and between the two foreign languages and the participant's native language. In addition, the effect of the two teaching conditions on the maintenance of the tested bidirectional intraverbal responses will be evaluated. Four children will participate in Study 1, which will evaluate the effect of tact instruction in two languages simultaneously (i.e., both foreign languages at the same time). Another eight children will participate in Study 2, which will evaluate the effect of teaching tact in two languages sequentially (i.e., Foreign Language 1 followed by Foreign Language 2). All participants will be exposed to the following experimental conditions: 1) Preliminary assessment, which will aim to ensure that participants have a similar pre-experimental history of learning concerning the experimental stimuli to be used; 2) Pretest of intraverbal and tact responses, to assess the participants' repertoire of bidirectional intraverbal responses before exposure to the teaching condition, as well as to define the experimental stimuli to be used based on the participant's performance in the test; 3) Tact instruction, during which the experimenter will present each stimulus simultaneously to the question "What is this in English?" or "What is this in Spanish?" (asked in the native language) and will give the echoic cue with the correct response in progressive delay (0s; 2s; 4s). The teaching of the same set of stimuli will be carried out in both languages, according to each experimental condition; 4) intraverbal posttest, which will investigate the emergence of bidirectional intraverbal responses between the two foreign languages and between the two foreign languages and the native language and; 5) Maintenance, which will verify the effect of each experimental condition on the maintenance of the tested bidirectional intraverbal relations. The data will be analyzed comparing the two studies concerning: 1) the number of correct responses in tests of bidirectional intraverbal responses between the two foreign languages and between the two foreign languages and the native language, 2) the number of correct responses in the maintenance test of bidirectional intraverbal responses and, 3) the number of instruction blocks up to learning criteria.