A research enterprise that I am currently excited about is a collaborative project between our doctoral researchers at the Department of Psychology, NUIM and Dr. Mark Dixon’s PEAK/ ABA (Promotion of Emergent Advanced Knowledge) research project at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). Many behavioural psychologists today are focused on the design of strategic teaching protocols for the promotion of derived learning (i.e., untaught, emergent). This type of learning is based on relational responding; as when a typically-developing child is taught a “same” relation with two identical pictures and then presented with one of those pictures and a picture of a different object, the child may derive a “different/not-same” relation for the latter stimuli and this derived relation emerges without having to be taught separately. Derived relations appear similar in process to the exponential learning that is ubiquitous in the language acquisition of young typically- developing children, but frequently not evidenced in children with ASD and related language deficits. Thus teaching protocols that promote derived learning may be of particular benefit for children with ASD and related language deficits, because derivation may be an essential component of advanced language and cognitive repertoires. The new Peak behavioural teaching applications are based on behavioural research literature on stimulus equivalence [1,3], derived relational responding, and relational frame theory [2]. The capacity for derivation of complex relations is exemplified when a child is taught that stimulus ‘A’ is opposite to ‘B’ and ‘B’ is opposite to ‘C’, and as a result derives (untaught) that A-C (and C-A) are alike. Put another way, an individual may derive complex relations such as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, without ever having been specifically taught this, but just on the basis of the initially learned relations (e.g., Jon is my enemy, Barry is Jon’s enemy, ergo Barry is my friend). These are rather simplistic examples of quite complex phenomena, but the point is that when an individual can derive complex and extensive relations between stimuli, the learning potential is tremendously increased because not every single aspect of every single stimulus or relation has to be individually taught.