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Souza, R. D. C. (2008). Ordinal relations under contextual control in Deaf Children. Doctoral
Thesis. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Teoria e Pesquisa do Comportamento, Universidade
Federal do Pará. 160 pages.
ABSTRACT
Dificulties presented by deaf children in math learning has led educators to develop special
teaching procedures. The equivalence paradigm has been useful in explaining complex
behaviors such as numerical concepts. This paradigm has been expanded to evaluate the
formation of stumulus equivalence classes in sequence. The emergence of new relations
through ordinal responding has been documented in various studies involving three-term
reinforcement contingencies. It is also necessary to ascertain whether these results remain
stable under four- and five-term contingencies. Three experiments were planned in order to
investigate the emergence of ordinal relations with simple discriminative control under
conditional and contextual control (with and without cross-trial randomization) in deaf
children. In Experiment 1, five deaf children, enrolled in a special public school, served as
participants. A microcomputor containing software (REL 4.0, for experiments 1, 2a and 2b,
was updated to version 5.0 in Study 3) was used. In study, participants were taught
overlapping sequences of stimulus pairs. Aferwards, tests of transivity and connectivity were
administered. All of the participants reached the criterion for success. The results replicated
findings from independent studies, thereby confirming the efficacy of the overlapping stimulus
teaching procedure in establishing of ordinal relations. In Experiment 2a, four new
participants, and one with an experimental history were taught to select stimulus pairs in
increasing order, in the presence of a green shape, and in decreasing order when a red shape
appeared. Thereafter, tests of transivity and connectivity were administered. Following this, a
test of stimulus generalization for classroom enviornment was given. All participants attained
the criterion for correctness, and in response to the transivity and connectivity tests. On the
generalization test, three participants responded consistently to the new stimuli, one gave
partial responses, and one gave no response. The results confirmed the eficiency of the
overlapping stimulus teaching procedure under conditional control in deaf children. The
participants in Experiment 2b were the same as in Experiment 1, with randomized trials and
conditional control. All participants reached the correctness criterion. Test responses coincided
with baseline data. In Experiment 3, there were three children from Experiment 1, and two
from Experiment 2a, who were exposed to the overlapping pair under contextual control (e.g.
A1→A2 in the presence of the circle + green color, or A2→A1, in the presence of the circle +
red color). All of them reached the criterion for sucess and passed the tests for transivity and
connectivity. The efficiencey of the overlapping stimulus teaching procedure under stimulus
control was verified, suggesting that contingency instruction with simple reinforcement, under
conditional control, were prerequisites for the emergence of ordinal classes under contextual
control. This study may be extended by increasing the number of sequences, and investigating
the emergence of new ordinal realtions with longer sequences, and verify whether the order,
withing the teaching sequence inferferes with ordinal responding.
Key-words: Ordinal relations, conditional control, contextual control, deaf children.