Abstract
Two experiments examined the emergent mapping phenomenon in Portuguese-speaking children aged 3–13, This phenomenon is relevant to developmental psychologists’ interest in ‘last mapping” of new word-referent relations and also to behavior analysts’ interest in behavior that emerges without explicit conditioning. We studied 52 children, using the “blank comparison” matching-to-sample technique described by Wilkinson and McIlvane (1997), The technique allows direct measurement of the stimulus control bases of emergent mapping, for example, to determine whether new words and their referents are related directly or via rejection (i.e., exclusion) of previously defined referents. Children demonstrated both types of controlling relations. These studies systematically replicate prior emergent mapping research in a large cohort of non-English-speaking children. Also found were apparent developmental differences between older and younger children. Although all children tended to relate novel stimuli, the tendency appeared to decline as children aged. This study confirms the utility of the blank comparison technique in emergent mapping research and also provides the first data set from school-aged children.
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This collaboration was supported in part by a Brazilian interinstitutional project grant (MCT/FINEP/PRONEX) and by grants from two Brazilian funding agencies: CNPq (Grant #522290/95-7 to Deisy G. de Souza) and FAPESP (to Julio C. de Rose). The experiments reported here were part of master’s research conducted by Aline da Costa under the supervision of Deisy de Souza in the Graduate Program in Special Education at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos. Scholarship support from CAPES is gratefully acknowledged.
William McIlvane and Krista Wilkinson were supported by grants from the U. S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD25995 and HD04147).
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Costa, A.R.A., Wilkinson, K.M., McIlvane, W.J. et al. Emergent Word-Object Mapping By Children: Further Studies Using the Blank Comparison Technique. Psychol Rec 51, 343–355 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03395403
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03395403