The acquisition of ordinal relations between arbitrary stimuli is an important behavioral skill required in learning academic behaviors and literacy. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of teaching overlapping adjacent two-term sequences on the emergence of ordinal relations with more than two stimuli. Overlapping occurs when the last stimulus in one sequence of two stimuli is the first stimulus in another sequence (e.g., S1 -> S2 and S2 -> S3, where S2 is the overlapped stimulus). Two-term sequences were taught in Phases 1 and 2 of an experiment conducted with five first grade students. Sequences A were taught with stimuli from sets A (A1 -> A2, A2 -> A3, A3 -> A4, A4 -> A5) and Sequences B with stimuli from set B (B1 -> B2, B2 -> B3, B3 -> B4, B4 -> B5). Once this baseline was established, tests verified the emergence of ordinal relations with three, four and five stimuli from sets A and B, separately. Phase 3 evaluated if stimuli from Sequences A and B were substitutable one for one another, on the basis of the same ordinal functions (the first, the second, etc.). The students learned all trained ordinal relations and showed the emergence of new (and longer) ordinal relations with stimuli of sets A and B stimuli, separately. Three students also showed substitutability between A and B stimuli in Phase 3. These findings suggest the formation of five stimuli classes, each one consisted of stimuli that occupied the same ordinal function in different sequences. These results suggest the emergence of five stimulus classes (A1B1, A2B2, etc), each one with stimuli that occupied the same ordinal function in different sequences. The results have implications for the analysis of complex symbolic behavior. Some methodological aspects seemed to have contributed for the occurrence of relational learning and the emergence of novel behavior.
ordinal relations; stimulus classes; symbolic behavior; first grade
