Four deaf adults with mental retardation were trained to establish a stimulus equivalence among pictures of facial expressions, words, and manual signs through conditional discriminations for four new vocabularies : sadness, happiness, anger, and neutral. For two subjects, the formation of stimulus equivalent relations were acquired only by two kinds of training, i.e., sign-picture and word-picture conditional discrimination tasks. After the training, they could point a word under discriminative control of manual signs without direct training. For the other two subjects, the direct training of all three relations, sign-picture, sign-word, and word-picture, in this order, were required. Expressive manual signs or writing responses were tested after the receptive training. All subjects could show both manual signs and/or writing responses without direct training for the stimuli which were used in the discrimination training. In the last phase (stage), stimulus generalization of the labeling to the facial expressions of pictures and live person was examined under the question by manual sign : Guess how that person feels now?" Two out of four subjects showed correct labeling.
View full abstract