I am honored and humbled to have been appointed as the new editor for The Analysis of Verbal Behavior (TAVB). I have had the opportunity to work closely with the previous editor, Jack Michael, first as an associate editor and most recently as the senior associate editor. In addition to my editorial skills, Jack has shaped most of my repertoire as a radical behaviorist, so I hope to continue his legacy, supporting and stimulating verbal behavior research. As the editor of the only journal dedicated to a behavioral analysis of language, I am responsible for offering a sample of state-of-the-art research derived from Skinner's (1957) analysis to a select readership. To complete this task, I have assembled a group of outstanding associate editors, each of whom have impressive credentials. These are David Palmer, who is mostly responsible for editing conceptual papers, Anna Petursdottir, who assists with experimental studies, and Mark Sundberg, who focuses on editing both empirical and conceptual studies with an emphasis on application. I am also fortunate to have Danielle LaFrance as TAVB's editorial assistant. She is not only a fine writer but is also a conceptually sophisticated behaviorist. Many editorial board members have been rotated in the past year. I would like to express my gratitude to all those who have served on the board. For new members, I thank you for accepting the challenge of shaping our field.
These are exciting times to serve as the editor for TAVB. The journal has never seen so many submissions, many of them consisting of empirical papers. Not long ago, the lack of empirical research on verbal behavior was a reason of concern for many behavior analysts. Although this rising interest in verbal behavior research may be a function of a multitude of variables, the applied work pioneered by Mark Sundberg (Sundberg, 2008; Sundberg & Michael, 2001), the founder of this journal, has undoubtedly projected Skinner's work to a wider audience. It is no coincidence that many studies published in TAVB over the years have been concerned with testing specific procedures to teach language to individuals with disabilities.
The use of Skinner's theoretical framework to design language-based interventions has been recently termed “the verbal behavior approach” (Barbera, 2007). Although I am excited to see the applied implications of Skinner's writings, I do not believe that this is a new approach. What we have is a strong movement away from a more traditional perspective, which assumes that language is an independent entity and that all communication consists primarily of the transmission of ideas. This perspective is shared by some modern behavior analysts and manifests itself through the development of teaching curricula that are heavily focused on what and when to teach rather than on what and how to teach it. This overreliance on cognitive approaches to the expression and reception of ideas, as well as on stages of development, suggests to me that many applied behavior analysts have distanced themselves from conceptual analyses and are thus providing “eclectic” services. If, however, we analyze verbal behavior as any other behavior, subject to the same principles as nonverbal behavior, then we all subscribe to the verbal behavior approach. Thus, the verbal behavior approach should not be used as a tact for a set of specific techniques but as a description of an explanatory system, one based on Skinner's (1957) work. However, if we decide to label every collection of procedures and their specific variations (e.g., prompting and fading techniques, correction procedures, stimulus presentations) currently being used by practitioners, we would end up with a very wide variety of different approaches. We could then argue that the effectiveness of each one of these approaches would have to be independently evaluated. Maybe this is what needs to be done. Consequently, I would like to encourage submissions of clinical reports that evaluate the effectiveness of specific procedures used to teach language. We should continue to show, through the pages of this journal, that despite procedural variations, any approach that is conceptually rooted in Skinner's causal analysis is not only effective but is more parsimonious.
The current issue presents a range of papers that cater to those interested in conceptual, basic, and applied issues in the analysis of verbal behavior. Volume 25 opens with an outstanding didactic article by Murray Sidman, whose seminal work on stimulus control (Sidman, 1994) has important implications for our understanding of meaning and symbolic behavior. Sidman's article is followed by a series of articles that, although mostly concerned with applied issues, present interesting methodological questions and conceptual discussions that are sometimes absent in strictly applied journals. The paper by Danielle LaFrance and colleagues, for instance, further evaluates the use of experimental functional analysis methodology to assess the functions of verbal responses. TAVB readers will find their results and discussion to be extremely pertinent to the future of this line of research. Eric Arntzen and colleagues make use of the “silent dog” method to evaluate the role of self-rules on nonverbal performance. Despite the limitations intrinsic to studying covert behavior, it is encouraging to see that some researchers have not given up on it. The article by Bobby Newman and colleagues is a great example of questions that arise from practice, and Rick Kubina and colleagues provide us with a nice review of procedures used to teach basic verbal operants.
Subsequent articles (Esch, Esch, & Love; Vedora, Meunier, & Mackay) are the first official brief reports to be published in TAVB. I hope that this new category will encourage submissions of replication studies, innovative pilot work, and case or clinical studies relevant to the application of behavior analysis to language acquisition. Brief conceptual and didactic papers, as well as responses to previously published articles may also be included in this category. Brief reports require less detailed descriptions of background, methodology, or findings than research articles do. I could not be happier with these two fine examples of experimental reports.
Two very interesting conceptual papers appear in this issue. The first one by Gross and Fox provides an overview of relational frame theory (RFT) and summarizes some of the controversy surrounding it. The authors respond eloquently to some of the criticisms made regarding RFT and invite further discussion. If RFT researchers are attempting to develop and refine the behavior-analytic approach to language acquisition, then there is no better outlet than TAVB for their work. I would like to personally invite RFT researchers to submit their articles to this journal. The second conceptual article by Terry Knapp describes the first public exposition of Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior (the Hefferline Notes), a written summary of a course Skinner taught at Columbia University during the summer of 1947. Knapp provides an interesting historical account that compares some of the content of the Notes with what later became Skinner's seminal work (Skinner, 1957).
Volume 25 closes with two reports that evaluate the past, present, and future of this journal. Petursdottir, Peterson, and Peters assessed the influence of TAVB on the field. They make excellent suggestions for increasing the visibility of the journal, so I thank them for all of the good ideas they have given me. Finally, my students and I (Marcon-Dawson, Vicars, and Miguel) reviewed articles published in the last 10 years of TAVB and concluded that the journal seems to have published more experimental articles than ever, with a recent emphasis in applied studies. As suggested by the authors, an evaluation of articles that will appear in future issues will reveal whether TAVB is becoming more of an applied journal. Despite this conclusion, be assured that I will make every effort for TAVB to become the publication of choice for those who study verbal behavior.
I had a great time editing Volume 25, and I hope you enjoy reading it.