When the Foundations Are Right: Unlocking Advanced Verbal Repertoires

When learners have been taught with precise conditional discrimination and established speaker–listener mediation, advanced verbal repertoires become significantly more teachable. In this final installment of the series on engineering generative verbal behaviour, we examine how the tools introduced in the previous sessions can be systematically scaffolded to establish more complex skills. Question discrimination, autoclitic frames (e.g., “because I see…,” “because I hear…”), and verbal mediation function as critical sources of stimulus control for event description, recall of past events, and simple inferencing. Building on previously established discrimination and mediation repertoires, participants will analyze how learners move from tacting compound stimuli to recalling events in the absence of the original stimulus conditions and explaining the controlling variables for their responses. Emphasis will be placed on sequencing instruction so that recall and visually or intraverbally based inferences emerge from cumulative stimulus control rather than isolated task training. Applications will focus on strengthening event description, tacting sources of control, and establishing simple inferential responding. The session will briefly outline how these repertoires set the stage for later complex reasoning, highlighting the cumulative impact of earlier programming decisions.