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.
© Association for Behavior Analysis International 2018.
Conflict of interestThere 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
