Stimulus equivalence in the formation of novel intraverbals. Luis A. Pérez-Gonzalez, Paula García-Martínez, María Jesús González-Lastra, Sara Camblor Chinea and Gladys Williams University of Oviedo and Applied Behavioral Consultant Services, New York, Spain and USA Stimulus equivalence and stimulus relations are typically studied with conditional discrimination procedures. But these basic processes are involved in complex verbal behavior; for example, productivity and the understanding of novel verbal utterances can be possible through stimulus equivalence processes. The purpose of this research is to study the efficacy of alternative procedures that can result in stimulus equivalence phenomena. For that, we replicated first a standard stimulus equivalence phenomenon with auditory stimuli; then, the auditory comparisons were omitted and a contextual cue indicated the type of response that was reinforced or expected according to equivalence. In such occasions, each trial consisted of a compound auditory stimulus presented by the experimenter followed by a vocal response. The four students who participated learned the A-B and B-C relations and demonstrated reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity in the unreinforced probes with auditory stimuli and vocal responses. Thus, stimulus equivalence was demonstrated to play a role in the formation of novel intraverbals. Keywords: stimulus equivalence, stimulus relations, verbal behavior.

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