Effects of prompting on the generative “usage” of gramatical particles: Acquisition or maintenance?

The “corred usage” of the article’s gender in pitrases was experimentally studied on three preschool children. The operant level of the grammatical par­ticle was measured without using neither reinforcement nor prompting pro-cedures. During the experimental conditions, only prompts were presented for each of the response classes under study: tacts and delayed tacts. As an effect of the presentation of the prompting stimuli, performance increased from zero to a hundred percent during the experimental periods. Results are analized in terms of the acction of the supplemental stimulation and its relationship to acquisition and maintenance of grammatical behavior.