Untrained referential behavior: The role played by the functional level of training on generalization

Abstract

One study evaluated the influence of the functional level of writing on generalization from oral linguistic competence to written language. Twelve children from second grade elementary school were selected. These children, while speaking and writing about "dogs", described only their physical characteristics, activities or habits, and did not produce expressions of a conditional, causal or functional nature. Two groups were formed. Training in Group 1 (referential level) involved written communication about the location of various characters or objects in a house and about a series of sketches constituting a story. Training in Group 2 (contextual level) merely involved copying stories, with performance criteria based on precision of the copy. The subjects of both groups were then trained to orally describe the characteristics of crabs in relation to functions, causes, conditions, and typical behaviors. In the final test, subjects of both groups incorporated the competence trained with the topic "crabs'' in the oral descriptions of dogs. Transfer to written descriptions of dogs, however, occurred for all subjects of Group 1 but only two subjects of Group 2. This indicates that the functional level of reactive system performance alters the probability that oral linguistic competence will be generalized to written language.