Fitzgerald, D. L. (2000). The effects of fluency in the acquisition of conditional, symmetric, and equivalence relations on the emergence of derived relational responding and the contextual control of relational behavior. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, 61(9-B).
The author, on her dissertation at the University of Nevada, assessed the effects of fluency in trained relations. Subsequent relational behavior was examined to test the claim that fluency in the component skills of a repertoire would produce contingency adduction (Johnson & Layng, 1992). Results indicated that training exemplars of the derived relations of symmetry and equivalence did not produce significant increases in the emergence of these relations. Additionally, providing training to a fluency criterion did not produce significant increases in the emergence of derived relations compared to either the yoked practice overlearning condition or the mastery only condition. Finally, the degree to which contextual control could be established given the different learning histories was examined. Contextual control over responding was established in all participants. Derived relations predicted from this training emerged at an equal probability across groups. Implications for both instructional design and descriptions of effective behavior in novel settings are addressed.