Teaching WH-Questions Isn’t Enough: Building True Conditional Discrimination

Many behaviour analysts can establish correct responding to individual WH-questions. However, when programs stall at more complex discriminations—such as discriminating features from functions questions, or adjectives from class relations—the issue is rarely the learner’s ability. The breakdown often reflects faulty stimulus control resulting from programming that uses a train and hope method of teaching question discrimination. This presentation challenges the assumption that teaching WH-questions in isolation produces flexible verbal repertoires. Drawing on the work of Dr. Francesca degli Espinosa, participants will examine how autoclitic frames and the scaffolding of skills can be used to systematically establish robust discriminated responding across verbal forms and to prevent faulty stimulus control before it becomes entrenched. Attendees will learn how to engineer instructional sequences that progressively expand from basic WH discriminations to adjective, feature–function–class relations, and other multiply controlled tact relations—while maintaining previously acquired repertoires. Emphasis will be placed on programming for cumulative complexity, analyzing stimulus control errors, and increasing instructional efficiency through greater technical precision. This session is designed for practitioners ready to move beyond teaching questions toward deliberately constructing generative verbal repertoires.