The Use of the Go/No-Go Successive Matching-to-Sample Procedure with Nonverbal Auditory Stimuli to Establish Equivalence Classes and Speaker Behavior.

The purpose of the current study was to extend the findings on the use of the go/no-go successive matching-to-sample (S-MTS) procedure to establish auditory equivalence classes. Eight college students learned to conditionally relate nonverbal auditory stimuli into three, 3-member classes. Following training, all participants met the emergence criterion for symmetry, and six out of eight participants met the emergence criterion for transitivity/equivalence. Furthermore, all participants responded with either an experimenter-defined or a unique tact, and five participants related these names intraverbally. Although these results replicate previous findings, albeit with stimuli that cannot be echoed, possible verbal mediation via tact and intraverbal behavior seems to have occurred.