Abstract
Despite the vast literature on simultaneous and sequential bilingualism, no behavior-analytic study to date has compared these two types of instruction. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to assess whether classes between words in two languages and the objects they “represent” may be established using both simultaneous and sequential teaching via the go/no-go successive-matching-to-sample (S-MTS). In Experiment 1, we taught AC and BC relations sequentially and simultaneously to eight participants to simulate these two types of bilingualism and tested for emergent intraverbals, tacts, and novel conditional relations during tests of symmetry and transitivity/equivalence. In Experiment 2, we taught eight participants an additional class to increase task difficulty. Across both experiments, all participants passed transitivity/equivalence tests after simultaneous teaching, whereas 13 out of 16 participants passed after sequential teaching. Our results suggest that simultaneous teaching leads to higher percentages of emergent tacts, intraverbals and novel conditional relations than sequential teaching.