Using RFT to Promote
Generative Language:
Volumes 1 & 2
Relational Frame Theory (RFT) views generalized derived relational responding—relational framing—as the core skill involved in human language. As such, RFT is essential for flexible, fluent conversational skills and academic progress. Our approach to early intervention integrates RFT theory and applied research on the assessment and training of derived relational responding skills with strategies developed by programs which follow a more traditional behavior analytic and specifically Skinnerian analysis of verbal behavior. In the first volume of our handbooks, we focus on assessing, establishing, and capitalizing on derived relational responding repertoires in frames of coordination (equivalence), and show you how doing so can promote generalized and generative language repertoires.
In Volume 2 of this handbook series, we focus on assessing and establishing relational responding repertoires in patterns of distinction, comparison, opposite, spatial, and temporal framing. We emphasize how doing so can promote generalized and generative language repertoires, taking a developmental approach beginning with early non- arbitrary relational responding and proceeding step by step towards arbitrarily-applicable derived relational responding across these patterns.
Throughout, we identify relational responding repertoires as behavioral cusps to teach towards an ultimate aim of establishing generative language, and present a powerful framework for approaching early intervention, based on RFT and informed by decades of research and practice.
Hedgehog Publishers is sadly no longer in operation. We are currently working on a revised and updated text and workbook that will include the information and protocols for both volume 1 & 2 as well as a new section tackling foundations and training the advanced repertoires of hierarchy, deictics, metaphor & analogy, and early rule governance . In the meantime, PDFs of volumes 1 & 2 are available in our RFT in EIBI Library, or email Siri to purchase the books while supplies last.