Tacting in ABA Therapy: How Children Learn to Label

Tacting is really just a fancy behavioral term for labeling things, actions, or events in an environment, but it is one of the most important verbal skills targeted in ABA therapy.

When a child says “dog” after seeing a dog, or “wow, it’s raining” when looking outside, those are two perfect examples of tacting in action. It may sound simple, but tacting represents a major milestone in connecting language to the world. When a person can tact their surroundings, they’re better able to communicate and participate in conversations.

In the field of verbal behavior (a significant part of ABA therapy), tacting is considered one of a few different operants described by B.F. Skinner in his book Verbal Behavior. Some other operants include echoics, mands, and intraverbals. Each of these operants plays a significant role in daily life, and tacting is connected to each of them. For children on the spectrum, teaching tacting can significantly boost communication growth and social awareness.

In this article, we’ll cover the ins and outs of tacting, so that parents know when they see it happening in their ABA sessions, why it’s important, and how they can help their children develop this critical skill.

The Science of Tacting

The science behind tacting relies on the concepts of stimulus control and reinforcement. When a learner tacts something correctly, it is because the presence of that stimulus has come to control their verbal behavior.

For example, if a child is walking with their family, sees a whiskered and furry friend, points, and says “cat,” the stimulus (the cat) has controlled the child’s verbal behavior (through tacting). This relationship between the stimulus (cat) and the behavior (the tacting) forms through repeated opportunities where the correct response is reinforced (perhaps mom’s excitement over seeing the cute kitty makes the child happy!).

Reinforcement for tacting is usually social rather than tangible. Smiles, praise, or acknowledgment serve as the natural consequence that strengthens the behavior. Over time, the child will start to learn that labeling things brings positive social attention and connection. This creates more motivation to use language. Tacting also, in a way, helps to further improve manding skills. Manding, another verbal operant, is a fancy behavioral term for being able to request things from others. Having a more developed tacting repertoire means that the learner can learn to mand (or ask for) a greater variety of things more easily.

Tacting also helps to support later skills such as answering questions, making comments during a conversation or shared experience, and engaging in conversations. It also supports academic readiness by allowing children to recognize pictures, participate in learning activities, and be able to follow early context clues in understanding.

When and Why to Teach Tacting

Tacting is typically introduced once a learner has begun to show consistent manding, imitation, attending, echoic, and listener skills. They need to be able to attend to stimuli before any tacting instructions are worked on, of course. Before working on tacting, they should also be able to receptively identify the item (that is, being able to point at the item when told to find it in a mix of other items).

The learner should also be able to echo words others say, since this is one of the most common prompts for tacting. Making sure that these skills are built up enough is crucial to success before targeting tacting skills. Once it is confirmed that the learner is ready to learn tacting, the goal is to build the learner’s vocabulary and help them connect words to their environment.

The ability to tact allows learners to express themselves and interact with others in a more meaningful way. Tacting also promotes social referencing, which is an important part of social communication. When a child looks at something, labels it, and then checks to see how an adult (or peer) responds, they are attempting to engage in joint attention. Joint attention is a significant part of socializing and building connections in relationships. I can think of multiple times just today where I saw something funny, cool, or just plain weird (perks of living in NYC!) and pointed them out to my partner to engage in joint attention.

Another reason tacting is important is its impact on academic and cognitive development. Descriptive language forms the foundation for answering questions, reading skills, writing skills, working with other peers, and building further knowledge on those things being labeled. Children who can tact accurately are equipped to better perform in classroom discussions and group activities.

Step-by-Step Guide to Teaching Tacts

1. Select target items or concepts. Before working on tacting targets, the targets need to be picked. Makes sense, of course. When choosing tacting targets, I typically go for items that the learner comes across in daily life. These types of items are always the most important to work on. I also like to add items that are related to what’s going on in their lives at home or school. For example, with the best holiday coming up soon on October 31st, I might choose to work on some themed targets like pumpkins, candy, and ghosts. I might also include other fall-related items, such as leaves, scarves, and apples.
2. Present the stimulus clearly and without competing distractions. Competing distractions will play a role later on when generalizing the skill. Before a skill can be generalized, it must be learned clearly. Showing a picture of a giraffe that has other animals in the background and a bunch of people in front, posing could be really confusing. Make sure that the stimuli are direct, clear, and that there is no possible confusion as to what is being labeled.
3. Prompt the learner’s response if necessary. If the learner does not respond independently, the behavior technician should provide an appropriate prompt so that the learner has the opportunity to answer correctly. Sometimes learners need a few prompts before they are able to respond independently, and that’s okay!  
4. Provide immediate reinforcement for correct tacts. Correct responses should be reinforced immediately. For newer tact targets, their responses should also be reinforced every single time they occur. This helps them to learn the items faster. Once they are consistently responding independently, reinforcement schedules can be reduced.
5. Fade prompts to encourage independent responding. As the learner’s independent responses grow, prompts are systematically faded to encourage independence. Once this happens, it is important that prompts are faded as quickly as they can be. Reinforcement schedules should also begin to thin out.
6. Mix mastered tacts with new targets for maintenance and generalization. A mastered target, while not a main focus during sessions, should definitely still be worked on during sessions to promote generalization and ensure maintenance of the target. Making sure to occasionally bring up a mastered tact helps the learner retain the information that they’ve learned.

Types of Tacting

There are several different types of tacting that a behavior technician may teach to a learner, with each type becoming increasingly complex. Knowing these different types of tacts helps learners to create relational networks within and between stimuli.

Object Tacting. This is often the first type of tact that is taught. It involves labeling tangible items. If a child sees a dog and says that it is a “dog,” that is an object tact. Short, sweet, and to the point!

Action Tacting. Tacting actions is the next step, and it involves labeling what an object is doing (typically a person, but could be an animal, character, etc.). If the dog begins running and the child says, “he is running,” that is an action tact.

Feature/Function/Class (FFC) Tacting. This is where tacting gets a bit more complicated. Tacting by FFC involves describing characteristics of items. Saying that the dog is an animal would be tacting by class, saying it has fur would be tacting by feature, and saying that dogs bark and eat homework would be tacting by function. Working by FFC tacting helps to create categories and concepts of items. It creates a deeper sense of what items are and helps learners to learn new ideas without explicit learning. Knowing more about the FFC tacts of a dog can make it easier to learn about other animals without having to learn each component over again with each new animal.

Abstract Tacting. Abstract tacts cover more complex or intangible ideas such as emotions, time, or weather. For example, saying “the dog feels happy” or “it is cold outside” involves an understanding of internal and external states. These are especially hard to teach because they can be relative to the person experiencing them. I am too cold in almost every room I walk into, but my dog starts panting and hanging out near the air conditioner any time the temperature is above 65 degrees.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

There are a few different pitfalls that people should be aware of when teaching tacting targets. Here are a few:

• Over-prompting and creating prompt dependency. Over-prompting is something to be aware of across the board for all domains of learning, but also with tacting specifically. If prompts are used too frequently or faded too slowly, the learner can easily become dependent and struggle to respond independently.
  This is especially easy to do with tacting targets because the type of prompt most often used is an echoic prompt. Echoic prompts are easy to implement but hard to fade. Making sure that behavior technicians are properly trained on how to fade echoic prompts and making sure that prompts are faded as soon as possible is essential with tacting targets.
• Teaching irrelevant or non-functional tacts. I once had a technician who wanted to work on tacting skills with the learner. She had brought a large pack of cards with different foods, animals, clothes, jobs, vehicles, and many other types of pictures to work on with him. While these categories were great options to choose from, I realized she was working on tacting different country flags with him. While knowing all of the country flags is a great party trick, it was much more important for him to learn to tact things that he will encounter in his daily life. When choosing tacting targets, I always make sure to choose items that the learner comes into contact with daily. Learning the words “dog” and “shirt” may be more meaningful than words like “mitochondria” or “pentimento.”
• Neglecting to generalize tacts across people, settings, and stimuli. Learned items that do not generalize across people, places, and stimuli have almost no benefit to the learner’s life. Being able to generalize skills is the most critical component of learning. If a child is able to label a picture of a cat, but ONLY if it is one specific picture of one cat, it cannot be said that the learner knows what a cat is. Varying stimuli and involving different communication partners can prevent this issue.
• Reinforcing with non-social rewards only, reducing natural use of tacts. Only using tangible reinforcement can limit natural communication. For many learners, the reinforcement may start as more tangible, but as the skill grows and the child learns more words, there is a gradual shift towards social consequences as the main reinforcement. This helps to keep tacting socially motivated. Just as prompting should be faded out, tangible reinforcement should be faded out.

Mi punto de vista como BCBA

I think when it comes to tacting, it is important to keep in mind relevance to daily life, cultural considerations, and the learner’s interests. I have come across some interesting picture cards throughout my career. Animals that I didn’t even know the name of, foods that I know most people don’t eat, and random electronics from the early ’90s. If a treatment goal says that a child will be able to tact 100 items, all 100 items chosen should be something that the child comes into contact with. No need for them to be able to label a Tamagotchi!

Cultural considerations should always be taken into account across the board, and that includes with targeting targets. I have had clients from all different backgrounds, and I always take extra care to make sure that chosen targets are culturally relevant. This can look like making sure that food item cards include cultural foods that the learner may eat regularly in their home. Cultural considerations could also mean not working on certain target items, such as with holiday themes, if the family does not celebrate.

Finally, considering the learner’s interests is important to keep learning fun. When first teaching the skill of tacting, it might make sense to first work only on tacting their favorite items, characters, animals, and so on. Interests can also help when teaching things like emotions, actions, and so on. If the learner really likes certain cartoon characters, perhaps items can be made showing that character doing different actions or portraying different emotions. Or, tacting can be worked on while watching their favorite show. Using the learner’s interest in teaching is always, always a great idea.

Conclusión

Tacting holds a central role in ABA therapy and in the process of language development. It allows learners to label, describe, comment, and share experiences with others. When children learn to label the world, they also learn to participate in it.

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