Emergent symbolic relations in speakers and nonspeakers Nancy C. Brady* ,1 , Lee K. S. McLean 2 University of Kansas Life Span Institute, Parsons, KS 67357, USA Abstract Eight adults with developmental disabilities and four typically developing preschool children participated in an experiment studying emergent stimulus–stimulus relations after match-to-sample instruction. Participants were taught to match lexigrams (arbitrary graphic stimuli) to objects. Each object was functionally related to another object in the teaching set. For example, brush and comb were members of the teaching set. Most participants were able to select objects when the objects were named in pretests. Post- teaching probes assessed emergent relations between spoken names and lexigrams. In addition, we included probes to detect emergent relations between related lexigrams. That is, would participants select the lexigram for comb when the experimenter displayed the lexigram for brush (without explicit teaching)? Two preschool children and five adults with developmental disabilities showed emergent relations between lexigrams and spoken words. However, only two preschool children showed the emergent lexigram to related lexigram relations. © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Individuals with developmental disabilities are frequently taught to commu- nicate by selecting graphic stimuli (e.g. pictures or printed words) that represent objects or events (e.g. Calculator & Dollaghan, 1982; Glennen & Calculator, 1985; Hamilton & Snell, 1993). Typically, an anticipated outcome of such instruction is the selection of the graphic stimuli in a variety of functional  This research was supported by Grant number 5 PO1 HD18955 from NICHD. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-612-624-3322; fax: +1-612-624-7586. 1 Nancy Brady is currently affiliated with the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus. 2 Lee McLean is currently affiliated with University of Connecticut, Storrs. Research in Developmental Disabilities 21 (2000) 197–214 0891-4222/00/$ – see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0891-4222(00)00034-2