Skinner's Analysis Research Articles

A scoping review of empirical research on emergent intraverbal behavior

AbstractFor decades, Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior has been applied in a variety of contexts. One critically important topic in this area is the extent to which some verbal operants may be learned indirectly, as a result of learning other verbal operants. This phenomenon is often referred to as emergent verbal behavior, and is critical to our understanding of how language is learned in a generative fashion across the lifespan. Emergent intraverbal repertoires are especially important because responses under some degree of intraverbal control may constitute a majority of responses in a fully formed verbal repertoire. Recent literature reviews suggest that there are many published studies on emergent intraverbals, but that this body of literature is highly heterogeneous. To provide an overview of this literature and map out the various tactics used across studies, we conducted a scoping review. We identified 99 total experiments on emergent intraverbals contained in 79 total articles. Findings are summarized in terms of populations and independent variables studied, procedural variations, and recommendations for future research.

Behind Closed Doors: Hidden Histories of Children Committed to Care in the Late Nineteenth Century (1882–1899) by Annie Skinner

Reviewed by: Behind Closed Doors: Hidden Histories of Children Committed to Care in the Late Nineteenth Century (1882–1899) by Annie Skinner Claire Phillips Behind Closed Doors: Hidden Histories of Children Committed to Care in the Late Nineteenth Century (1882–1899). By Annie Skinner. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021. xvii + 254 pp. Annie Skinner's analysis of child removal in nineteenth-century England starts and ends with the words of Cecily, who was removed from her parents in 1886, around age ten: "I don't know what they took me away for . . . I didn't think I had done anything wrong at home and now I have lost every body" (1, 236). Cecily's words bring out the lack of understanding that children who were removed from their parents had over their situation. Removed due to her mother's behavior, Cecily spent six years in the care of the Waifs and Strays Society (WSS) under section 14 of the Industrial Schools Amendment Act 1880. The Act allowed institutions such as the WSS to remove children from families if they felt there was due cause and the child was in danger. By removing the children and placing them in industrial schools, the WSS was effectively criminalizing children while claiming to save them. Skinner's book Behind Closed Doors shows the ways in which much of the discussion regarding children and their parents took place behind closed doors, without knowledge or understanding from parents or children. However, Skinner brings out the neglected voices of children and their parents as they navigated life in the care of the WSS. Attitudes towards removed children come through clearly within this book. The middle-class Victorian ideals that molded views on poverty evidently impacted the ways in which poor, and so called neglectful, parents were seen. Working-class parents who were unable to conform to these middle-class ideals, such as Cecily's mother, were seen as a danger to their children. The Victorian notion of children replicating their parents' poor lifestyles or behavior was core [End Page 309] to the child protection, and child saving, movements of the later nineteenth century. However, it was these "saving" and "protecting" procedures that led to removed children being criminalized under the Industrial Schools Amendment Act. Skinner argues that the simultaneous process of saving and criminalizing scarred the children for life—particularly girls, who were often removed for moral reasons. While in the care of the WSS, the children were educated, although as Skinner notes, this education was carefully crafted to keep them in their place. Girls were trained for domestic service while boys had more of a range of occupations open to them, and thus received a wider range of training. Yet children were expected to contribute to the domestic labor within the school, allowing the school to capitalize "on children's economic value rather than emotional needs" (118). The children admitted to WSS were effectively institutionalized, and this is something that stayed with them their whole lives, sometimes for the better but often for the worse. Skinner argues that the purpose of this book is to understand the processes by which children came into care. We see the various ways in which children were committed by the WSS and we hear from the children and their parents through letters that have survived. The letters show a different view of the removal process when compared with the legislation and the ideals of the WSS in terms of child saving and clearly show the middle-class ideals that prevailed versus the emotional bonds between parents and children that were so often broken. In her analysis of children's experiences of state removal, Skinner argues that letter-writing by WSS children upon leaving the institution "was a positive proactive step as it indicated an effort to take control over their lives" (149). It was one of the few areas of their lives that they had a say in, and this accounts for the number of letters that have survived. The children, upon leaving, wrote to the WSS to express their gratitude, as expected. Yet they also requested different positions, showing that the children had the agency to control their futures, at...

Verbal behavior development theory and relational frame theory: Reflecting on similarities and differences.

Relational frame theory and verbal behavior development theory are two behavior-analytic perspectives on human language and cognition. Despite sharing reliance on Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior, relational frame theory and verbal behavior development theory have largely been developed independently, with initial applications in clinical psychology and education/development, respectively. The overarching goal of the current paper is to provide an overview of both theories and explore points of contact that have been highlighted by conceptual developments in both fields. Verbal behavior development theory research has identified how behavioral developmental cusps make it possible for children to learn language incidentally. Recent developments in relational frame theory have outlined the dynamic variables involved across the levels and dimensions of arbitrarily applicable relational responding, and we argue for the concept of mutually entailed orienting as an act of human cooperation that drives arbitrarily applicable relational responding. Together these theories address early language development and children's incidental learning of names. We present broad similarities between the two approaches in the types of functional analyses they generate and discuss areas for future research.

Intraverbal Assessment for Persons with Aphasia or Other Acquired Brain Injury.

An intraverbal assessment was administered to older adults with aphasia, using a hierarchy of questions that required increasingly complex verbal discriminative stimulus control. Five categories of errors were defined and analyzed for putative stimulus control, with the aim to identify requisite assessment components leading to more efficient and effective treatments. Evocative control over intraverbal error responses was evident throughout the database, as shown by commonalities within four distinct categories of errors; a fifth category, representing a narrow majority of errors, was less clear in terms of functional control over responses. Generally, questions requiring increasingly complex intraverbal stimulus control resulted in weaker verbal performance for those with aphasia. A new 9-point intraverbal assessment model is proposed, based on Skinner's functional analysis of verbal behavior. The study underscores that loss or disruption of a formerly sophisticated language repertoire presents differently than the fledgling language skills and errors of new learners, such as typically developing children and those with autism or developmental disabilities. Thus, we would do well to consider that rehabilitation may require a different approach to intervention than habilitation. We offer several thematic topics for future research in this area.

Implementing an applied verbal behavior model in classrooms

AbstractApplied verbal behavior (AVB) is an intervention approach grounded in Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior. Common components of the AVB approach have been established as evidence‐based, indicating the approach should be progressed into the manualization and implementation phase of research. In the present study, we used an intervention package consisting of computer‐based training, performance and competency‐based training, and in vivo training to promote the use of AVB procedures in 26 classrooms in a nonpublic school serving students with autism. We evaluated the effects of this intervention package on the performance of teacher level staff via a controlled consecutive case series design, nonconcurrent multiple probe design, and aggregate data analysis using inferential statistics. Results showed that staff members demonstrated high levels of fidelity with AVB procedures when working directly with students. Measures of student behavior showed significantly increased engagement with staff members, reduced interfering behavior, and increased rates of manding. These findings have implications for the dissemination of AVB in educational settings.

T-Pattern Detection and Analysis (TPA) With THEMETM: A Mixed Methods Approach.

This work, which was started in the early 1970s, was inspired by social interaction analysis based on direct observation and careful coding of behaviors according to a list of behavioral (mostly ethological) categories, especially the ethological work of N. Tinbergen, K. Lorenz, and K. von Frisch, for which they shared a Nobel Prize in 1973 in Medicine or Physiology but also H. Montagner’s ethological analyses of interactions in social insects and children. S. Duncan’s psychological and linguistic research on turn-taking in human interactions provided great inspiration, and so did Chomsky’s work on syntactic structure and Skinner’s probabilistic real-time functional analysis and their consequent debate. A hypothesis concerning numerous kinds of temporal and spatial natural and especially biological structures, the T-pattern is a hierarchical self-similar fractal-like structure that recurs with significant translational symmetry on a single discrete dimension, initially real time. It also points to profound self-similarity across many levels of biological spatio-temporal organization, as it seems characteristic of molecular structures such as genes and a multitude of recurrent motives on DNA and its 3D generalization corresponding to (3D) folded proteins. Developed initially to facilitate empirical analysis, the T-pattern and its detection algorithms were first presented in AI (Magnusson, 1981) and Applied Statistics (Magnusson, 1983) through THEME (3 k Fortran IV) software using an evolution algorithm. It is now over 300 k lines of code, runs under Windows, and, more recently, uses parallel processing for increased speed. This has allowed abundant detection of hidden structure in numerous kinds of biological phenomena at highly varied scales, from human behavior at timescales of days (Hirschenhauser et al., 2002; Hirschenhauser and Frigerio, 2005) to interactions of many individual neurons simultaneously registered at a temporal resolution of 10–6 s in neuronal networks in rat brains to ongoing work on T-patterns in DNA molecules at a spatial nano-scale. T-pattern detection and analysis (TPA) thus mix qualitative and quantitative analyses, as T-patterns themselves are artificial categories composed of recurring coding categories with special real-scale statistical relations between their instances. After their detection, T-patterns are thus analyzed much as are other behavioral categories.

The importance of multiple exemplar instruction in the establishment of novel verbal behavior.

According to traditional linguistic accounts language, and its generative nature, cannot be taught. From a behavior analytic perspective, language is like any other behavior; it is learned and amenable to change. Based upon Skinner's radical behavioral analysis of verbal behavior, specific procedures have been designed to promote novel verbal relations. However, despite the strength and utility of this approach, using behavioral principles to understand the generativity of language has been challenging. Dependent upon the specific theory (e.g., stimulus equivalence, relational frame theory, bidirectional naming) within the radical behavioral orientation, researchers arrange unique procedures to evaluate the variables responsible for this phenomenon. This paper presents the commonalities and differences of two procedures (i.e., multiple exemplar training, multiple exemplar instruction) with examples of research highlighting the use of both in producing generativity. Further, it describes how multiple exemplar instruction is independent from other procedures leading to this outcome, and concludes by providing recommendations for both research and practice.

Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds

Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds

Empirical Evaluations of Skinner's Analysis of Problem Solving.

We reviewed 12 studies in which the researcher taught problem-solving strategies, such as self-questioning and visual imagining, to children and adolescents with and without disabilities to facilitate the learning of math, spelling, play/social, and communication skills. We analyzed these studies in terms of types of problem-solving strategies, the multiple control involved in problem solving, the extent to which problem solving occurred at the overt or covert level. In addition to suggesting limitations of the literature, we recommend areas for future research and practice.

Reflections on Verbal Behavior at 60.

In the present essay, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the publication of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, I stand by and defend the judgment I expressed in my article "The Long Goodbye: Why B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior Is Alive and Well on the 50th Anniversary of Its Publication" (2008c)-that Skinner's "interpretation of the behavior of the speaker, given the contingencies of reinforcement maintained by the community" (Skinner, 1987, p. 11), is not only adequate but is also consistent with the principles of operant learning. To that I add some of my reflections on the book after having taught it for years and having written numerous articles extending Skinner's analysis to related topics.

Recollections of Jack Michael and the Application of Skinner's Analysis of Verbal Behavior.

Jack Michael offered a course on verbal behavior almost every year throughout his teaching career. Jack was also interested in the application of Skinner's work and in 1976 began to offer a graduate course at Western Michigan University titled Verbal Behavior Applications. Jack and his students pursued the application of Skinner's work on verbal behavior with dozens of empirical studies during the 1970s. In honor of the 60th anniversary of the publication of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior, the current paper presents some of my recollections of Jack's work on verbal behavior as his student, graduate teaching assistant, and research collaborator during that time period.

Teaching complex verbal operants to children with autism and establishing generalization using the peak curriculum.

The present study evaluated the feasibility of the PEAK Relational Training System's Generalization Module (Dixon, 2014b) to teach and establish generalization of autoclitic mands, distorted tacts, and creative path finding in three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Using a multiple-baseline design across behaviors, each participant was provided with differential reinforcement and a least-to-most prompting hierarchy for correct responses to a subset of stimuli, and responses to other similar stimulus sets were probed for emergent generalization. Following training, each participant successfully acquired the directly trained behaviors and demonstrated generalization to the nonreinforced test exemplars. These data support the utility of Skinner's (1957) analysis to teach complex forms of verbal operants, and suggest that a manualized curriculum such as PEAK may have utility for promoting skill development and generalization for front line staff and caregivers of children with autism.

The Functional Independence of Skinner's Verbal Operants: Conceptual and Applied Implications

Much has been said about B. F. Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior. This commentary specifically focuses on the functional independence of B. F. Skinner's verbal operants. While researchers have long been interested in this topic, the research literature on this topic has produced mixed results; it has shown that the verbal operants may be both functionally independent and functionally interdependent. This commentary considers the conceptual and applied implications of these mixed findings. The distinction between constructs and events is highlighted, with specific attention to how this distinction relates to the consideration of the verbal operants in behavior analysis. The value of further research on the functional independence of the verbal operants is considered, as well as the type of research studies that might be useful toward developing interventions for individuals with language delays. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Common and Intraverbal Bidirectional Naming.

Naming has been defined as a generalized operant that combines speaker and listener behaviors within the individual. The purpose of this paper is to reintroduce the concept of naming and its subtypes, common and intraverbal, distinguish it from other terms such as the tact relation, and discuss the role of naming in the development of verbal behavior. Moreover, a taxonomical change is proposed. The addition of the qualifier bidirectional would serve to emphasize the speaker-listener bidirectional relation and serve to distinguish the technical term from its commonsense use. It is hoped that this paper will inspire future basic and applied research on an important extension of Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior.

Function-Altering Effects of Rule Phrasing in the Modulation of Instructional Control.

This study evaluated the effects of four instructional variants on instruction following under changing reinforcement schedules using an operant task based on Hackenberg and Joker's Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 62, 367-383 (1994) experimental preparation. Sixteen college-aged adults served as participants and were randomly assigned to one of four instruction conditions (directive, generic, non-directive, and control). Results suggest textual verbal behavior modulated instruction following. Specifically, directive and generic instructions produced greater levels of instructional control and relatively lower levels of schedule control compared to non-directive instructions. Thus, participants in the directive and generic groups responded in accordance with the instructions even when schedules of reinforcement favored deviation from the instructed pattern. In contrast, participants in the non-directive group responded toward the optimal pattern. In the control condition, participant responding was variable but toward the optimal pattern. Findings are interpreted within the framework of Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior and formulation of rule governance.

On the Autonomy of Psychology from Neuroscience: A Case Study of Skinner's Radical Behaviorism and Behavior Analysis

The main goal of this article is to discuss the place of psychology in the domain of natural sciences as an autonomous endeavor from neuroscience. However, given that psychology is not a monolithic...

The Effects of Multiple Exemplar Instruction on the Relation Between Listener and Intraverbal Categorization Repertoires.

We evaluated the effects of multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) on the relation between listener and intraverbal categorization repertoires of six typically developing preschool-age children using a nonconcurrent multiple-probe design across participants. After failing to emit intraverbal categorization responses following listener categorization training, participants were exposed to MEI in the form of alternating response forms (listener and intraverbal) during categorization training with novel stimulus sets. For two participants for whom there was some evidence of emergent intraverbal responding, responding was variable. For the remaining four participants, 32 to 99 MEI trial blocks produced minimal improvement in responding or no emergent responding at all. The results are discussed in terms of Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior and naming theory.

Referent-Based Verbal Behavior Instruction for Children with Autism.

Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior deconstructed language according to stimulus control. Although the functional independence of these verbal operants has been empirically demonstrated, more commonly, a speaker's verbal behavior is induced by a convergence of controlling stimuli. However, circumscribed stimulus control may inhibit the development of complex verbal repertoires for some individuals, including those with autism spectrum disorders. For this reason, in the current paper, we propose a behavior analytic intervention with the overarching goal of establishing multiple control over verbal behavior through the conditioning of referent stimuli.Referent-based instruction emphasizes teaching the operant class over specific targetsMultiple control is established by converging verbal behavior around the referentProgress is measured in terms of a stimulus control ratioEliminates arbitrary decision making.

Effects of Mands on Instructional Control: A Laboratory Simulation.

The effects of two types of mands on participants' adherence to instructions were examined across two groups using procedures based on Hackenberg and Joker (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 62:367-383, 1994). Participants were presented with instructions describing a pattern of responding for producing points later exchanged for money and were exposed to choice trials in which a progressive-time (PT) and a fixed-time (FT) schedule were concurrently available. The instructions initially described how to optimize point production; however, the PT schedule was manipulated over the course of the experiment such that response patterns maximizing point production differed across conditions. All participants experienced the same experimental arrangement, and the two groups differed only in the form of the mand contained in the instructions presented to them. The instructions for the directive group contained the mand "you must…" (i.e., command) preceding the instructed response pattern, whereas the non-directive group instructions contained the mand "you might consider…" (i.e., suggestion) preceding the instructed response pattern. Results indicated that instruction type influenced response patterns across changing contingencies. The directive group exhibited greater adherence to the instruction than the non-directive group when instruction following was less profitable. Results are interpreted in terms of Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior, and implications for practical application are discussed.

Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law, by Annabel S. Brett

Changes of State. Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law, by Annabel S. Brett. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2011. xiv, 242 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). Annabel Brett's book is an accomplished study of the contested boundaries between and the in early modern natural law discourse. She traces the various discourses on the relation between the political and natural spheres from the influences of ancient and medieval political thought on early modern writers to the debates between and amongst scholastic Catholic political thinkers, Protestant Aristotelians, and others, highlighting the often radical departures from earlier traditions in the thought of Hugo Grotius and especially Thomas Hobbes. The book's achievements are at several levels: as an impressively detailed intellectual history of some of the wide-ranging controversies preoccupying natural law theorists in sixteenth- to mid-seventeenth-century Europe; as a cogent analysis of what is at stake in Grotius's and above all Hobbes's significant developments of natural law theory: and as an innovative approach to the study of political thought. Brett's introduction nicely sets out the major themes of her work and reveals her methodological concerns. As is clear from her copious footnotes, Brett's study arises out of the so-called Cambridge School approach to the history of political thought as epitomized by the work of such scholars as Quentin Skinner, Noel Malcolm, and James Tully. Hence she is concerned with the formation of the political languages of natural law as they emerge in European thought, and her interpretation of Hobbes is indebted to Skinner's analysis of Hobbesian liberty in contradistinction to republican notions of freedom--implicitly, she shares Skinner's critique of Hobbes's position. But her focus is on intellectual context as much as on the context of historical practice: as she writes, her analysis is trained upon the characteristic argumentative motifs of this idiom or way of talking as a whole, rather than on particular authors as agents within their specific contexts (p. 9). Thus her work both broadens, for example, contextualist interpretations of Hobbes by situating his thought relative to continental European natural law (rather than focusing mainly on the historical circumstances in England surrounding Hobbes's work), and offers a unique historical perspective which indirectly engages with the work of such contemporary political thinkers as Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben on natural, territorial, juridical, and political spaces. The study is framed by the divisions between nature and the city, or Libertas and Imperium--in the frontispiece to Hobbes's De Cive (reproduced in Brett's introduction)--divisions which nevertheless are interpenetrated in various ways in Hobbes's thought. Brett shows how Hobbes's account relates to earlier treatments of the nature/city problematic by addressing a dominant theme in each chapter as dealt with by natural law theorists. In Travelling the Borderline, she relates Francisco de Vitoria's treatment of ius gentium as a law of humanity which sanctions the free movement of travellers into foreign countries to Domingo de Soto's assertion of the right of beggars to travel freely across borders: their chief activity as mendicants seeking to preserve themselves as human beings straddles the borderline between city and nature, in the physical but not political space of animals (p. …