Instructions may evoke novel behavior, without a previous history of learning by exposure to contingencies of reinforcement; however a few studies have investigated the comprehension of instructions. Based on the stimulus equivalence paradigm as a model for the study of meaning, this research investigated whether instructions included as members of a class of equivalent stimuli acquire the same meaning as the other stimuli in the class. The experimental instructions were short sentences. The meaningful stimuli were actions (filmed on videotape). The procedure included: (a) teaching conditional discriminations between spoken verbs and actions and between spoken verbs and abstract pictures, (b) assessing the formation of classes between actions and pictures, and (c) verifying instruction following evoked by oral instructions and by the equivalent pictures. Fourteen of 15 children showed class formation. Most children also followed the instructions. The formation of equivalence classes established the "meaning" of instructions and fostered instruction-following behavior for both oral and pictorial instructions. The control by pictorial instructions was slightly lower than the control by oral instructions, but considering that such instructional control could only occur if derived from the stimulus classes, the results are conclusive: equivalence leads to the comprehension of instructions.
Instructional control; stimulus equivalence; conditional discriminations; verbs; children
