Why Children with Autism Often Fail to Acquire Intraverbal Behavior 
 Dr. Mark Sundberg

Children with autism often experience significant difficulty with conversations, social interactions and other verbal activities that involve intraverbal behavior. One cause of this problem is the nature of the stimulus control. Most intraverbal behavior involves verbal conditional discriminations where one verbal stimulus alters the evocative effect of a second verbal stimulus, and collectively they evoke a differential intraverbal response. An appreciation of the progression of increasingly more complex verbal conditional discriminations is essential for the development of an effective intraverbal curriculum for children with autism.