Abstract
There have been numerous developmental studies of relational framing in children with and without developmental disabilities. In the current research, we sought to explore various facets of the core repertoires of arbitrarily applicable relational responding in order to determine how these repertoires potentially influenced one another. In particular, we assessed repertoires of coordination, distinction, comparison, and opposition with both mutually entailed (ME) and combinatorially entailed (CE) relations, as well as deictic relations in typically developing children and in children with autism spectrum disorder. We also systematically investigated the contextual conditions under which the two groups of children could or could not demonstrate the target relational responses (i.e., by testing the relations in contexts that were more or less naturalistic). Overall, the results indicated no uniform patterns that differentiated the two groups, suggesting that relational repertoires do not develop in a linear manner from nonarbitrary to arbitrary or from mutual to combinatorial entailment. Furthermore, the context in which these repertoires are assessed also appears to be important. That is, naturalistically presented trials do not necessarily appear to be easier for these children to demonstrate than when trials are presented in a more abstract format. The novel protocols presented here show how key patterns of derived relational responding can be systematically assessed and potentially compared, in a manner that may be of use to developmental and educational researchers.