Correspondence Between Vocal-Verbal Behavior and Go/No-Go Responses During the Successive Matching-to-Sample Procedure

In the current study, eight college students were exposed to a successive matching-to-sample (S-MTS) procedure utilizing non-verbal auditory stimuli consisting of common sounds. During emergent relations tests, participants were asked to talk aloud, and their vocal-verbal statements were transcribed and categorized as class-consistent, class-inconsistent, or irrelevant. All participants met emergence criterion for symmetry and four did so for transitivity/equivalence. Analysis of vocal-verbal statements showed a positive correlation between class-consistent statements emitted by participants and correct selection responses during S-MTS tasks. Such results suggest possible verbal mediation during emergent relations tests.