There were some limitations in the first experiment One limitation was

that only one pre-intervention probe was conducted for Participant S across the three dependent measures prior to intervention. Because there was only one probe, it is impossible to determine the pattern of responding before the intervention or to evaluate if the observed effects occurred as a function of the intervention. Additionally, Experiment 1 did not control for steady state

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responding with Participant D and there were some slight increases in the number of correct spelling responses prior to intervention.

Experiment 2. Experiment 2 was not without limitations, as well. The most salient limitation is the small number of post-intervention probes conducted for Participants B and M. As evidenced with participants in Experiment 1, the number of intervention sessions required until participants textually responded at criterion level varied substantially across participants due to factors of multiple causation; like the participants in Experiment 1, Participants B and M may need to participate in additional phases of intervention before significant differences in textual responding and spelling occur. However, due to time constraints, additional sessions could not be conducted prior to the completion of Experiment 2.

Future Research

Several studies have indicated that it is possible to make good predictions about the reading outcomes of individual children, including children as young as kindergarteners (Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 2001; Elbro, Borstrom, & Petersen, 1998; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994). These predictions can be made by evaluating demographic information, socioeconomic status and parental education, as well as by assessing the individual’s oral language production, or, from a behavioral perspective, his or her speaker behavior. Accurate echoic behavior, for example, is critical to the production and manipulation of even the smallest phonemic units. Therefore, for children with specific deficits in speaker behavior, such as children with disabilities, it is imperative that interventions that address speaker responding are developed and incorporated into both language and reading instruction beginning at an early age. Given this information and the findings garnered from the experiments presented herein, future research should arrange instruction so that students have ample opportunities to respond as

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listeners and speakers to their own textual responses, even at the single sound level, in addition to responding to another individual’s production of the units. In contrast, the significance of the behavior momentum blending antecedent remains unclear. Perhaps, the antecedent expedited the acquisition of vocally blended responses thereby expediting the subsequent acquisition of textual responses. Perhaps, the rotation of responding as a listener, speaker, and speaker-as-own-listener was the key component of the procedure. Future research may want to compare outcomes for participants who do not receive the behavioral momentum antecedent to those who do.

Additionally, future research may benefit from considering some of the variables that could account for the differences in responding across the participants, including the wide- ranging number of sessions required to demonstrate criterion level textual responding. For instance, while all the participants textually responded to all 44 phoneme-grapheme

combinations prior to intervention, the experimenter did not assess the fluency of responding to the letter sounds during participant selection, which may have been a considerable oversight. Experimenters looking to replicate these findings might maximize results and minimize the duration of intervention by controlling for letter-sound fluency.

Given Lyons’ (2014) previous findings using an auditory matching of component sounds to composite words procedure, future research may also want to consider a comparison of the effects of the Behavioral Momentum Blending Intervention (BMBI) and the auditory matching intervention described in Lyons’ study on the accuracy of textual and spelling responses emitted by students who are learning to read. Additionally, future researchers may want to consider the utility of the procedure in the classroom or as a redesigned element of Direct Instruction. Lyons’ procedure, for example, involved a progression through ten phases of intervention, whereas most of the participants in this study required fewer than ten phases of intervention to demonstrate

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significant differences in responding on reading and spelling measures. However, because Lyons did not describe the total number of sessions required to complete the intervention, it is

impossible to determine if one procedure is more time-consuming than the other without additional investigation.

Educational Implications

Within the field of reading research, there has been widespread agreement that blending and segmenting the sounds that comprise words are critical components of a proficient reading repertoire, particularly for young readers (Daly et al., 2004). Skills related to sound

manipulation, letter-sound correspondence, and using letter-sound correspondences to read words are all strong predictors of reading achievement by the end of first grade (Ehri & Sweet, 1991). Results from the present study suggest that given multiple opportunities to blend and segment letter sounds in words, students may learn to read and spell words phonetically. These findings substantiate the conclusions from earlier educational and behavioral-based studies emphasizing the significance of blending and segmenting in learning to read (Daly et al., 2004; Lyons, 2014).

Considering the shift from overt to covert responding observed in this study as well as Lyons’ (2014) study, explicit blending and segmenting instruction, in which vocal blending and segmentation is overtly modeled, might be necessary for students who are struggling to textually respond to regular words. Several participants in the present study, for example, insisted on “saying the sounds” prior to textually responding to novel words, particularly during the early stages of the intervention. By overtly segmenting the sounds in the words, the participants learned to listen to their own speaker responses and hear the composite target response. This component-to-composite instruction taught the participants a specific skill they could employ

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when they were required to read an unknown word. For young readers who encounter a multitude of new words daily, this instruction provides one method for accurate textual responding, especially when transformation of stimulus control to the whole word has not yet occurred.

The Behavioral Momentum Blending Intervention facilitated the acquisition of different production responses related to literacy, as well. Participants learned to spell words accurately in addition to reading them accurately, even though spelling was not a behavior that was directly taught. These findings suggest that by teaching students to segment and blend the component phoneme-grapheme correspondences in words, students can acquire collateral behaviors related to reading and writing; in other words, segmenting and blending may facilitate the acquisition of transformation of stimulus function. Ehri (2000) described a reciprocal relationship between reading and spelling; however, perhaps it is the reciprocity between blending and segmenting that makes possible the establishment of both types of responding.

Conclusion

In two experiments, I tested for a) the effects of a Behavioral Momentum Blending Intervention (BMBI) on the accuracy of textual responses, vocally blended responses without text, and spelling responses emitted by preschool students, b) differences in component and composite responding as a potential function of probe and intervention procedures, and c) the acquisition of conditioned reinforcement for observing printed words. The present study

demonstrates the effectiveness of BMBI on increasing accurate textual and spelling responses by blending phonetically for students with blending difficulties as well as those with few to no reader repertoires. These increases may be due to the rotation across listener, speaker, and speaker-as-own-listener responses using multiple exemplars that are embedded in the

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intervention, or it may be that the behavioral momentum antecedent allowed for the first instances of vocal blending, from which blending to textually respond became a contingency- shaped response. The results of the present investigation also substantiated Lyons’ (2014) earlier claims that segmenting and blending are behaviors that occur at the overt level prior to becoming covert, as is the case with other speaker-as-own-listener behaviors, such as self-talk. Moreover, the findings suggest that there may be a hierarchy involved in learning to blend to read words; results showed that all participants acquired vocal blending prior to, or in conjunction with, textual responding, while spelling was consistently the last repertoire to emerge. These findings mirror the shift from listener or speaker to speaker-as-own-listener that appears to occur when learning to blend and substantiate earlier findings that listener behavior emerges prior to speaker and speaker-as-own-listener responding. Finally, results from Experiment 2 signaled a change in the reinforcing value of how individuals respond to printed words once textual responding is possible, indicating that blending individual sounds into words, first vocally and later with print, may qualify as a verbal behavior developmental cusp. As described throughout this paper, reading is perhaps the most significant predictor of successful academic and professional

outcomes and students who fall behind in reading as early as kindergarten or first grade often fail to “catch up.” Results from these studies suggest that these students may be missing a critical speaker-as-own-listener cusp related to blending and that instruction that rotates across listener and speaker responses, such as BMBI, may be powerful in joining the two types of responding and bringing them under the control of textual stimuli.

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Figure 15. This figure shows results across all participants from Experiment 1 during post-BMBI probe sessions. Empty slices within the pie chart indicate less than 80% responding for the textual responding, vocal blending, and spelling responses. For conditioned reinforcement for observing printed words to be present, the participants needed to observe the pages of printed words for an equal duration, or longer duration, than they observed pages of two-dimensional picture stimuli. Conditioned reinforcement for observing print was not measured for the first three participants. Participant S Participant D Participant J Participant Z Participant A

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Figure 16. This figure shows results across all participants in Experiment 2 during post-BMBI probe sessions. Empty slices within the pie chart indicate less than 80% responding for the textual responding, vocal blending, and spelling responses. For conditioned reinforcement for observing printed words to be present, the participants needed to observe the pages of printed words for an equal duration, or longer duration, than they observed pages of two-dimensional picture stimuli. Participant T Participant G Participant M Participant B Participant P Participant W

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