University of Kentucky.
J Appl Behav Anal. 1972 Winter;5(4):455-65. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1972.5-455.
Four-year-old children were tested on letter discrimination. Subjects in two experimental groups went through an experimental training program on a match-to-sample apparatus. Subjects in the experimental-critical group were given reinforcers for responding to features of the stimuli thought critical for discriminating letters while subjects in the experimental-noncritical group were given reinforcers for responding to non-critical features. Subjects went through the training program daily until they reached criterion; then they were posttested on letters. Subjects in a control group received no training but were posttested. Subjects in all groups made fewer errors on the posttest. Subjects in the experimental-critical group made significantly fewer posttest errors than subjects in the experimental-noncritical group, lending support to the hypothesis that reinforcement of discriminative responding to critical features of letter-like stimuli results in greater improvement in letter discrimination than reinforcement of discriminative responding to noncritical features of stimuli. Analysis of confusion matrices provided tentative indications of the nature of letter confusions in 4-yr-old children.
四岁儿童接受了字母辨别测试。实验组的两个组别在匹配样本仪器上接受了实验训练。实验关键组的儿童因对被认为是辨别字母的关键刺激特征做出反应而得到强化，而实验非关键组的儿童因对非关键特征做出反应而得到强化。儿童每天接受训练，直到达到标准，然后进行字母后测。对照组没有接受训练，但进行了后测。所有组的儿童在后测中错误都较少。实验关键组的儿童在后测中的错误明显少于实验非关键组的儿童，这支持了这样一种假设，即强化对类似字母刺激的关键特征的辨别反应比对强化对刺激非关键特征的辨别反应更能提高字母辨别能力。混淆矩阵的分析提供了四岁儿童字母混淆性质的初步迹象。
