Instruction-Following Behavior: It Generalizes.

Operant conditioning procedures were used in four studies to establish instruction following skills in severely and profoundly retarded children. In the first study, a combination of physical guidance, fading, and reinforcement procedures were used to train an 11-year-old boy to follow 25 verbal instructions. In the second study, a transfer of stimulus control procedure was invoked to train three children to follow the same instructions. Since no generalization occurred to untrained items in studies 1 and 2, a third study was undertaken with two Ss to determine whether being trained to follow instructions in which one verb was combined with several nouns would result in generalization when other verbs were combined with the same nouns. Ss of study 3 generalized to untrained items; however, there were some difficulties in establishing initial discriminations when training was initiated on the verb. In study 4, six Ss were trained on the individual noun and verb components in isolation. Two of the six Ss developed an intensive generative instruction following skill, three Ss developed a partial generative skill, and one S developed no generative abilities whatsoever. (GW)