Conventional ideas of language and communication pose for a scientific understanding of verbal behavior

INTRODUCTI0N1

Henry D. Schlinger Jr.

The year 2007 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957). This anniversary is worth noting because, according to most accounts, a scathing review by a young linguist named Noam Chomsky (1959) in the journal Language not only undermined Skinner's main arguments but simultaneously hammered a nail in the lid of behaviorism's coffin and paved the way for the return of cognitive psychology (e.g., Hunt, 1982). Even though many linguists and psychologists said good­ bye to Verbal Behavior and to behaviorism in the wake of Chomsky's review, both are still around and seem to be thriving. Given that the book Skinner called his most important work (Skinner, 1977) is selling as well as ever, it might be instructive to look at why it and the discipline that forms its experimental foundation have been so resilient.

THE DEATHS OF VERBAL BEHAVIOR AND BEHAVIORISM HAVE BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED

To borrow the words of Mark Twain, reports of the death of behaviorism were greatly exaggerated (see Wyatt, Hawkins, & Davis, 1986). In fact, according to Virues-Ortega (2006), scientometric studies cast doubt on claims that behaviorism was predominant in the United States before World War II and that a cognitive revolution following the war signaled its demise. These studies also indicate that behaviorism (now referred to as behavior analysis) has undergone a slight but steady growth over the past 20 years. Other evidence suggests that behavior analysis is healthy. 1 Previously published as "The Long Good-bye: Why B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior Is Alive and Well on the 50th Anniversary of Its Publication" in The PsychfJlogical &cord, 2008, 58, 329-337.

V IV I NTROD LCrro~

after ~perimenting with m or e ea rthly th in gs. Bcca u e kinncr's analysis rested on already es tablish ed experimen ta l p rin ciples he probably ~ought he was on pretty safe ground for p u rs uini an mterpreta~on. Thus, perhaps he didn't really un dersta n d wha c the fuss over hJS book wa s aJI about whe n h e wrote:

My Verbal Behavior ha s been called co ntroversia l, and in :;e accepted sense. of ~ e wo rd perh aps it is, b ut mo. c

the argumentation JS due to a misundersta nding Th~ book is not about lan guage. A langu age i a verbai envu~nment, which shapes an d maintains ver bal beha~1or. ~s an environment, it is composed of Ii Len­ ers. rngu1sts h ~ve u sually studied listening ra ther tha n spea mg (a typical questio n is why a senten ce m a ki sense), but Verbal B ha . . . cs behavior of th e kvwr i ~ a n m terp reca tio n of t he

e spea er, give n the c · . reinforcement maintained b on tm ~enc1c of principles drawn fro h y the commum ty. It u se nonverbal behavior m dt e ehxperimc nta l a na lys is of concerned the o J - an . n o t ing e lse. So far a I am . . ' n Y question is wh eth h .

t1on 1s adequate but th . e r l e mterp rcta- h ' at IS no t th e q . . .

t e supposed controve rsy Th u es t1o n ra1 ed by language as the expressi~n o~~~ who wa nt lo a na lyze of information or th 1 eas, the t ran s mission

' e communica t · f naturally employ diffe io n o m ea ning b rent con cepts Wh th

etter is a question but. . · e e r th ey work ' is 1t a controversy? (1987, p . 11 )

The only question for Sk· t. c mne r. the n h mn con1ormed to and was ' . ' was w ethe r the inte rpre•" ·t b constramed b th . ur • was ased. For most behavior I y e pnnciples on which :~ a~rmative (e.g., Palmer, 2006:~a i sts, the a n swe r h as been in

e av1or analysis has been mix d . ut th e a n swe r from ou tsid e When Vi b l B ha e · er a e vior was pub]. h

atle~st 14 reviews-many of whi~ ed, Chom sky's review was o ne of avanetyofjoumalsatthetim (K we re p ositive- tha t ap pea d. ;ega.tiv~ re~ew was seized u:On :aff' 1992),. ~though Cho~ky~ . ~- md1cat1ons, however, that th : d efini tive rebuttal.3 There m1t1ated by Chomsky's review had ~ tide against Verbal Behavior ' For a briefhisto · gun to tum b th Palme r. 2006 nca 1 perspective on Skinner•s " bal Y e 1980s. For

• a. .-er: B eha · Vlor a nd Chomsky's - ·· . ... icw, S<'C

INTRODUCTION

example, in a 1991 article titled "Skinner and Chomsky 30 Years Later, or The Return of the Repressed:' linguistic historiographer .Julie Tetel Andresen described several reasons, related to the cognitive humanistic zeitgeist of the 1960s, why a behavioristic account of verbal behavior was repressed while Chomsky's structural theory of generative grammar was embraced. Andresen ( 1991) also described how changes in the psychological zeitgeist, as well as developments in biological thinking about the brain­ in particular, the selectionist features of neural Darwinism (Edelman, 1987)-provided "a more positive climate" for the return of Skinner's account of verbal behavior. Moreover, by the 1980s, possibly as a reaction against structural linguistics and its failure to generate practical applications, many linguists were already turning to a more functional approach that emphasized the social, contextual components of language (e.g., Halliday, 1985; Halliday & Hasan, 1985), thus creating a zeitgeist more favorable to a behavioral analysis of verbal behavior.

VERBAL BEHAVIOR IS ALIVE AND WELL

Over fifty years after the publication of Verbal Behavior, we can ask how it has fared in terms of more utilitarian considerations, including the number of books sold and citations. Precise quanti­ tative data are difficult to come by, but even an informal analysis reveals a surprising answer.

Let's begin with the most difficult assay, the number of books sold. For this, we have to rely on crude and ofte n incomplete data. However, for the first 14 years, we have fairly accurate data ­ thanks to Skinner himself. Figure 1, based on royalty receipts from Skinner's publisher, shows that from 1957 until 1972, cumulative sales of Verbal Behavior totaled about 13,500 copies. This is a remarkable number, since the book was extremely difficult, even for behaviorists. The steepest rise in sales occurred during the first three years (1957-1959) and then again after about 1962. One could perhaps argue that the slower rate of sales between 1959 and 1962 was due to Chomsky's review. But it is obvious that, at least in terms of number of books sold, Chomsky's review did not have a d evastating effect. See Figure 1 for sales of Verbal Behavior from 1957 to 1972 .

flJ 1200 ~

y - ~ ~ 900 Q

t 600 1

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':I 300 ~

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: <.O 00 0 CN <.O 00 0 ~ ~ 00 00 O'l O'l ~ O"l O"l 0 0 0 O'l 0, O'l O'l O'l 0, 0, 0, 0 0 0 ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... .... CN ~ CN

VI VII INTRODUCTION

13500

12009

10500 "O -Q fJ'} 9000 {IJ 7500 ~ .... ll. Q 6000

t.) 4500

3000

1500

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Year

Figure 1. Cumulative sales of Verbal Behamor fr?m 1957 to 1972. (Adapted from a figure hand-drawn by B. F Skinner and proVJded courtesy of Dr. Juhe Vargas.)

Figures for sales of Verbal Behavior during the ensuing years are difficult to find, but the Association for Behavior Analysis Interna­ tional sold more than 646 copies from 1998 to 2006 (Association for Behavior Analysis, electronic mail, May 18, 2007). According to Dr. .Julie Vargas, Skinner's daughter, about 940 copies of Verbal Behavior were purchased from the B. F. Skinner Foundation and Copley Publishing Group in 2006 alone (Julie S. Vargas, electronic mail, March 30, 2007)-an amazing number, demonstrating that Verbal Behamor is truly undergoing a resurgence.A crude indication of the relative strength of Verbal Behavior is that on Amazon.com, its sales consistently rank about twice as high as sales of Chomsky's Synt.actic Structures (1957), which, coincidentally, also celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2007.

We can further assess the durability of Verbal Behavior by looking at how often it is still cited. At least two citation analyses of Verbal Behavior have been conducted in the past 25 years. One, concluded in 1984, examined the Social Science Index and the Science Citation Index and found that between 1966 and 1983 Verbal Behavior had been cited 836 times (McPherson, Bonem, Green, & Osborne, 1984). A more recent analysis by Dymond, O'Hora, Whelan, and

INTRODUCTION

O'Donovan (2006) used the Institute for Scientific I_nform~tio~ ISi) index and the journal The Analysis of Verbal Beha'(JU)r (which_ is

~ot yet listed in the iSI) and found 1,093 citations of Verba_l Behavior from 1984 to 2004 (see Figure 2). Although ~~ stud1~s found that a majority of citations were from non:mpmcal. articles, the D mond ~t al. study found a slow but steady mcreas~ m the rat~ of e~pirical studies citing Verbal B~haVW:-, ?emonstra~ng a growm~ body of evidence supporting Skinners mterpretation and taxon omy of verbal operants (Sautter & LeBlanc, 2006). Moreover, fro_m 1984 to 2004 the average number of all citations of .ver~al ~eha'(JU)T rose from 32 to 52 per year, a 61 % increase, and an md1cau?n th~t "Vi bal Behavior has had a substantial influence on academic wnt­ in; that continues to the present date" (Dymond et al., 2006, p. 78).

Year

figure 2 Cumulative number of citations of Verbal Behavior from 1984 lo 2004. (Figure provided courtesy of Dr. Simon Dymond .)

. 1 · n birth to other empirical and Skinner's Verbal Behavior ?::t /0 ~v: conceptual base. Consider

theoretical p~g~ms denlv(Low:nkron, 1998). In its simplest form, theconceptof.1omtcontro bal rant topography is evoked

O joint control occurs when ~ne ver {mi usually a self-echoic and jointly by two sources of stlIDu 1us con ,

IX INTRODUCTION VIII

a tact. For example, suppose a child who has never been taught to point to a red square is instructed to point to the red square from an array of colored shapes. According to a joint-control account, the child echoes the instruction "red square" and then continues to self-echo ("red square;' "red square," etc.) until she sees the red square, which immediately evokes the response "red square" as a tact. At that instant, under the joint control of "red square" as a self-echoic and as a tact, the child points to the red square. As Lowenkron notes, this type of selection response may be considered a descriptive autoclitic (Lowenkron, 1998; Skinner, 1957): By pointing, the child is in a sense reporting which colored square "enters into joint control with the topography currently under self-echoic rehearsal" (Lowenkron, 2006, p . 125).

A joint-control account, as a form of mediated stimulus selection, has an advantage over unmediated accounts in that it is inde­ pendent of the particular stimuli used (Palmer, 2006b). Thus, a joint-c?ntrol account of selection-based responding, including rnatchmg-to-sample procedures, is a parsimonious explanation because it appeals to the ongoing behavior of the individual as a sourc~ of s~mulus ~ontrol over selection-based responding. More­ over, It has imrn~d1ate p~actical applications in language training programs for children with language deficits (Sidener, 2006). For present purposes, however,joint control is important because it is a the?retical a~d empirical program derived from the concepts descnbed by Skmner m Verbal Behavior and from the more general concept of operant stimulus control.

WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE VITALITY OF VERBAL BEHAVIOR?

. What.ex~lains the vitality of Verbal Behavior over 50 years after its publication and Chomsky's review? Although this question may prompt more than one answer. one stands out and d the real value of Skinner's inte;pretative account of launn erscoreds

· h' h · · guage an th e science on w 1c It 1s based: It works. Verbal Behavior has been successful on two levels. First as an interpretat· · · b th . . ' ion, ll IS o a parslDloruous and an adequate account of the beha · f k

· · 'th vioro spea ers I t IS consistent wi the principles established in th · 1 ·

laboratory, and it does not appeal to any oth e expenmenta er processes or

INTRODUCTION

mechanisms. Skinner's interpretation may not be exhaustive, but because it posits o~jective events and is based on a foundation of extant experimental principles, it is plausible.

Verbal Behavior also succeeds on another level: Many of its concepts are immediately applicable to language instruction. In fact, a technology of teaching verbal behavior based generally on the science of operant learning and specifically on Skinner's analysis has already been developed. This technology has been in use for several decades, but more recently it has mushroomed because of its success with people diagnosed with autism and related disorders. Individuals with autism typically exhibit qualitative impairments in communication, including the delay or total lack of speech, the inability to sustain a conversation with someone else, and the repetitive use of idiosyncratic speech (e.g., echolalia). In the past 10 years or so, an increasing trend has been to address those deficits not only within applied behavior analysis but also by using Skinner's interpretation in Verbal Behavior. Numerous programs around the world now emphasize a verbal behavior component as a critical ingredient to their treatment regimen. Furthermore, research on teaching manding, tacting, echoic, and intraverbal behavior, as well as powerful but subtle variables such as auto­ matic reinforcement, is also becoming more common, although still largely restricted to journals devoted to publishing behavior analytic work (e.g., Hernandez, Hanley, Ingvarsson, & Tiger, 2007; Lerman, Parton, Addison, Vomdran, Volkert, & Kodak, 2005; Miguel, Petursdorrit, & Carr, 2005; Wallace, Iwata, & Hanley, 2006; Wright, 2006; Yi, Christian, Vittimberga, & Lowenkron, 2006). Moreover, a number of books based in large part on Skinner's analysis are now on the market (e.g., Greer & Ross, 2008). :"hese books are designed to teach various aspects .of ver?al behavior to populations ranging from typically developmg children to those diagnosed with developmental delays.

CONCLUSION

It seems absurd to suggest that a book review could cause ~ paradigmatic revolution or wreak all the havoc that Chomsky s review is said to have caused to Verbal Behavior or to behavioral psychology. To dismiss a natural science (the experimental analysis

XI X INTRODUCTION

of behavior) and a theoretical account of an important su~ject matter that was 23 years in the writing by arguably the most eminent scientist in that discipline based on one book review is probably without precedent in the history of science.

Evidence certainly indicates that reports of the death of Skinner's Verbal Behavior or any operant analysis of language were indeed greatly exaggerated. Although the book may have lain somewhat dormant fo~ several years, interest in it and in a behavior analysis oflan~uage m general has been revived as part of the slow progress that science often makes. As Palmer (2006a) has recently written:

Science is like a river, flowing inexorably downstream, freshened and swollen by rivulets of data. Our effo rts to dam or div~rt it a~e too puny to prevail for long against the gathering weight; sooner or later all obstacles are swept away, and the river resumes its n atural course . . .. In 1957, the tributary represented by Skinner's book was a mere trickle and was easily dammed. But water is now spilling over the top. (p. 265)

. Thos~ who long ago said good-bye to Skinner's Verbal Behavior m P ~rt1cular, and to behaviorism, in general, may have to dust off the 1 welcome back" sign.

REFERENCES

ANDRESEN, ]. (1991). Skinner and Chomsky 30 years later . Th repressed. The Behavior Analyst, l4, 4 ~ 0 . or. e return of the

CHOMSKY, N. (1957). Syntactic structures The H . M CHOMSKY, N. (1959). Review of B. F. Skinner's ~~,,:l out~n. DYMOND, s~ O'HORA, D~ WHELAN R & O'DON BehaVU>f: Language, 35, 26-58.

sis of Skinner's Verbal Behavicr. 198..:.2004 The B 0':7AN, A . (2006). Citation analy- EDELMAN, G. (1987). Nt'Ural Darwinism· The.tk ~~ior Analyst, 29, 75-88.

Basic Books. · ory 01 neuronal group selecti0'7I. New York: GREER, R. D., & ROSS, D. E., (2008). Verbal behavior a . . .

verbal capabilities in children with 1,a e <lei.a nalysis. Developing and expanding HALLIDAY, M.A.K. (1985). Spoken~~~· Boston: Allyn & Bacon/Merrill.

Press. nguage. Oxford: Oxford University

~LLID~Y, M.A.K., & HASAN, R. (1985). Lan -e in a social-semiotic perspectiue. Oxford· Oxford ~U . ' co_ntext, and text: Asf>«;ts of I.an~

· ruverstty Press.

INTRODUCTION

HERNANDEZ, E., HANLEY, G. P., INGVARSSON, E. T~ & TIGER, J. H. (2007).A preliminary evaluation of the emergence of novel mand forms. Journal of Applied Behauwr Analysis, 40, 137-156.

HUNT, M. (1982). The univene within: A new science explores the human mind. New York: Touchstone.

KNAPP, T. J. (1992). Verbal &havior: The other reviews. The Analysis of Verbal Behavfor, 10, 87-95.

LERMAN, D. C., PARTEN, M ., ADDISON, L.R., VORNDRAN, C. M., VOLKERT, V. M~ & KODAK, T. (2005). A methodology for assessing the functio ns of emerging speech in children with developmental disabilities. Journal of Applied Behaviur Analy­ sis, 38, 303-316.

LOWEN KRON, B. (1998). Some logical functions of joint control. Journal of the "Experi­ mental Analysis of Behavior, 69, 327-354.

WWENKRON, B. (2006). An introduction to joint control. The Analysis of Verbal Behav­ ior, 22, 123-127.

MACQUORODALE, K. (1970). On Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Journal of the &perimnltal Analysis of Behavior, 13, 83-89.

MCPHERSON, A ., BONEM, M., GREEN, G., & OSBORNE, ]. G. (1984). A citation analysis of the influence on research of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Tk Behaviur Ana­ qst, 7, 157-167.

MIGUEL, C. F., PETURSDOTIIR, A., & CARR,J. (2005). The effects of multiple- tact and receptive-discrimination training on the acquisition of intraverbal behavior. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 21, 27-41.

PALMER, D. C. (2006a). On Chomsky's appraisal of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. The Behaviur Analy,st, 29, 253-267.

PALMER, D. C. (2006b). Joint control: A discussion of recent research. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 22, 209-215.

ROEDIGER, R. (March, 2004) . What happened to behaviorism? APS Observer. SAlfITER, R. A~ & LEBLANC, L . (2006). Empirical applications of Skinner's analysis

of verbal behavior with humans. The Analysis of Verbal Behaviur, 22, 35-48. SIDENER, D. W. (2006). J o int control for dummies: An elaboration of Lowenkron's

model of joint (stimulus) control. The Analysis of Verbal Behaviur, 22, 119-122. SKINNER, B. F. (1957). Verbal behaviur. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. SKINNER, B. F. (1977). The experimental clnalysis of operant behavior. In R. W. Reiber

& K. Salzinger (Eds.), The roots of American psychology: Historical influences and impli­ caJums fur the futur,: (Annals of the New Yonc Academy of Sciences, Vol. 291, pp. 374-385). New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

SKINNER, B. F. (1987). Controversy? In S. Modgil & C. Modgil (Eds.), B. E Sliinner: Coruensus and controvmy (pp. 11-12). New York: Fahner.

VIRUES-ORTEGA,J. (2006). T he case against B. F. Skinner 45 years later: An encoun· ter with N. Chomsky. The Behaviur Analy.st, 29, 243-251.

WALLACE, M. D., IWATA, B. A., & HANLEY, G. P. (2006). Establishment of mands following tact training as a function of reinforcer strength. Journal of Applied Behau­ ior Analysis, 39, 17-24.

WRIGHT, A. N. (2006). The role of modeling and automatic reinforcement in the construction of the passive voice. The Analysis o[Verbal Behaviur, 22, 153-169.

WYATT, W. J., HAWKINS, R. P., & DAVIS, P. (1986). Behaviorism: Are reports of its death exaggerated? The Behavior Analyst, 9, 101- 105.

Yl,J. I., CHRISTIAN, L., VITTIMBERGA, G., & LOWENKRON, B. (2006). Gener­ alized negatively reinforced mantling in children with autism. The Analysis of Verbal Behauiur,22,2 1-33.

Part I

A PROGRAM

Chapter 1

A Functional Ana!Jsis of Verbal Behavior

MEN ACT upon the world, and change it, and are changed in turn by the consequences of their action. Certain processes, which the human organism shares with other species, alter behavior so that it achieves a safer and more useful interchange with a particular environment. When appropriate behavior has been established, its consequence~ work through similar processes to keep it in force. If by chance the environment changes, old forms of behavior disappear, while new consequences build new forms.

Behavior alters the environment through mechanical action, and its properties or dimensions are often related in a simple way to the effects produced. When a man walks toward an object, he usually finds himself closer to it; if he reaches for it, physical contact is likely to fol­ low; and if he grasps and lifts it, or pushes or pulls it, the object fre­ quently changes position in appropriate directions. All this follows from simple geometrical and mechanical principles.

Much of the time, however, a man acts only indirectly upon the en­ vironment from which the ultimate consequences of his behavior emerge. His first effect is upon other men. Instead of going to a drink­ ing fountain, a thirsty man may simply "ask for a glass of water" -that is, may engage in behavior which produces a certain pattern of sounds which in turn induces someone to bring him a glass of water. The sounds themselves are easy to describe in physical terms; but the glass of water reaches the speaker only as the result of a complex series of events including the behavior of a listener. The ultimate consequence, the receipt of water, bears no useful geometrical or mechanical rela­ tion to the form of the behavior of "asking for water." Indeed, it is

1

VERBAL BEHAVIOR

characteristic of such behavior that it is impotent against the physical world. Rarely do we shout down the walls of a Jericho or successfully command the sun to stop or the waves to be still. Names do not break bones. The consequences of such behavior are mediated by a train of events no less physical or inevitable than direct mechanical action, but clearly more difficult to describe.

Behavior which is effective only through the mediation of other persons has so many distinguishing dynamic and topographical prop­ erties that a special treatment is justified and, indeed, demanded. Problems raised by this special mode of action are usually assigned to the field of speech or language. Unfortunately, the term "speech" emphasizes vocal behavior and is only awkwardly applied to instances in which the mediating person is affected visually, as in writing a n~te. "Language" is now satisfactorily remote from its original com­ mi.tme~t ~o vocal be~avior, but it has come to refer to the practices of a lmguist1c community rather than the behavior of any one member. The adjective "linguistic" suffers from the same disadvantage. The term ."ve~bal behavior" has much to recommend it. Its etymological sanction is not too p~werful, but it emphasizes the individual speaker and, whether recogmzed by the user or not, specifies behavior shaped and 1:°aintain:d by mediated consequences. It also has the advantage of bemg r~l~uvely unfamiliar in traditional modes of explanation.

A .de~mtxon of verbal behavior as behavior reinforced through the mediation ~f other persons needs, as we shall see, certain refinements. Moreover, lt does not say much about the behavior of the listener, even though there would be little verbal behavior to consider if someone had not already acquired special responses to the patterns of ener~ generate~ by the speaker. This omission can be justified, for the behavior of th~ listener in mediating the consequences of the behavior ?f the speaker is not necessarily verbal in any special sense It i £ t b d' · · h · cannot, n ac , e istmgms ed from behavior in general d d . , an an a equate f accoun~ o verba.l behavior need cover only as much of the behavior of the listener as 1s needed to explain the beh · f h b h · av1or o t e speaker The

e av1ors of speaker and listener taken together com h . b . pose w at may e 11 d ca e a total verbal episode. There is noth' · h ·

h . h · mg m sue an episode w 1c is more than the combined behavior of t · . . N th' .. ,, . wo or more md1v1duaJs

o mg emerges m the social unit. The s eaker c . . while assuming a listener, and the listener hp! ~n be studied

w 1 e assummg a speaker Th e separate accounts which result exhaust the . d . . . participate. episo e m which both

A FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

It would be foolish to underestimate the difficulty of this subject matter, but recent advances in the analysis of behavior permit us to approach it with a certain optimism. New experimental techniques and fresh formulations have revealed a new level of order and pre­ cision. The basic processes and relations which give verbal behavior its special characteristics are now fairly well understood. Much of the experimental work responsible for this advance has been carried out on other species, but the results have proved to be surprisingly free of species restrictions. Recent work has shown that the methods can be extended to human behavior without serious modification. Quite apart from the possibility of extrapolating specific experimental find­ ings, the formulation provides a fruitful new approach to human behavior in general, and enables us to deal more effectively with that subdivision called verbal.

The "understanding" of verbal behavior is something more than the use of a consistent vocabulary with which specific instances may be described. It is not to be confused with the confirmation of any set of theoretical principles. The criteria are more demanding than that. The extent to which we understand verbal behavior in a "causal" analysis is to be assessed from the extent to which we can predict the occurrence of specific instances and, eventually, from the extent to which we can produce or control such behavior by altering the condi­ tions under which it occurs. In representing such a goal it is helpful to keep certain specific engineering tasks in mind. How can the teacher establish the specific verbal repertoires which are the princi­ pal end-products of education? How can the therapist uncover latent verbal behavior in a therapeutic interview? How can the writer evoke his own verbal behavior in the act of composition? How can the sci­ entist, mathematician, or logician manipulate his verbal behavior in productive thinking? Practical problems of this sort are, of course, endless. To solve them is not the immediate goal of a scientific anal­ ysis, but they underline the kinds of processes and relationships which such an analysis must consider.

TRADITIONAL FORMULATIONS

A science of behavior does not arrive at this special field to find it unoccupied. Elaborate systems of terms describing v~rbal behavior have been developed. The lay vocabulary abounds m th~m. ~l~s­ sical rhetoric, grammar, logic, scientific methodology, lmguisucs,

5 VERBAL BEHAVIOR 4 literary criticism, speech pathology, semantics, and many other dis­ ciplines have contributed technical terms and principles. In general, however, the subject here at issue has not been clearly identified, nor have appropriate methods for studying it been devised. Linguistics, for example, has recorded and analyzed speech sounds and semantic and syntactical practices, but comparisons of different languages and the tracing of historical changes have taken precedence over the study of the individual speaker. Logic, mathematics, and scientific method­ ology have recognized the limitations which linguistic practices im­ pose on human thought, but have usually remained content with a formal analysis; in any case, they have not developed the techniques necessary for a causal analysis of the behavior of man thinking. Clas­ sical rhetoric was responsible for an elaborate system of terms describ­ ing the characteristics of literary works of art, applicable as well to e_veryday speech. It also gave some attention to effects upon the hstener. But the early promise of a science of verbal behavior was never fulfilled. Modem literary criticism, except for some use of the technic_al vo~abulary of psychoanalysis, seldom goes beyond the terms of the mtelhgent layman. An effective frontal attack, a formulation appropriate to all special fields, has never emerged under the auspices of any one of these disciplines.

Perhaps this fact is res~onsible for the rise of semantics as a general account of verbal behavior. The technical study of meaning was al­ ready under way as a peripheral field of linguistics when in 1g2 3 Ogden ~nd Ric?ards 1 demonstrated the need for a broader 'science of sym~ohsm. This was to be a general analysis of linguistic processes applicable to any field and under the domination of no special inter­ est. Attempts ~ave been made to carry out the recommendation, but an adequate science of verbal behavior has not been achieved. There are ~ev~ral current brands of semantics, and they represent the same special mterests and employ the same special techniques h f Th · · 1 h d f as ereto ore.

e ongi?a met _o o Ogden and Richards was philosophical, with psy~holog1c~l lea~i?gs. Some of the more rigorous systems are frank} logical. In hngu1st1cs, semantics continues to be a · f h y . question o ow meanmgs are expressed and how they change Some se . . d 1

· 1 · h · manucists ea mam Y wit the verbal machinery of society pan· 1 1 0th · ll ' icu ar Y propaganda ers are dessen~ia Y. t~erapists who hold that many of the trouble~

f h o t e wor 1 are 1mguistic error. The curren f h .. . . cy o t e term semantics" h s ows the need for a science of verbal behavior wh. h ·11 b .

1 1c wi e divorced

Ogden, C. K., and Richards, t. A., The Meanin I M . g O eanrng (New York, 1923).

A FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

from special interests and helpful wherever language is used, but the science itself has not emerged under this aegis.

The final responsibility must rest with the behaviorial sciences, and particularly with psychology. What happens when a man speaks or responds to speech is clearly a question about human behavior and hence a question to be answered with the concepts and techniques of psychology as an experimental science of behavior. At first blush, it may not seem to be a particularly difficult question. Except on the score of simplicity, verbal behavior has many favorable character­ istics as an object of study. It is usually easily observed (if it were not, it would be ineffective as verbal behavior); there has never been any shortage of material (men talk and listen a great deal); the facts are substantial (careful observers will generally agree as to what is said in any given instance); and the development of the practical art of writing has provided a ready-made system of notation for reporting verbal behavior which is more convenient and precise than any avail­ able in the nonverbal field. What is lacking is a satisfactory causal or functional treatment. Together with other disciplines concerned with verbal behavior, psychology has collected facts and sometimes put them in convenient order, but in this welter of material it has failed to demonstrate the significant relations which are the heart of a sci­ entific account. For reasons which, in retrospect, are not too difficult to discover, it has been led to neglect some of the events needed in a functional or causa l analysis. It has done this because the place of such events has been occupied by certain fictional causes which psychology has been slow in disavowing. In examining some of these causes more closely, we may find an explanation of why a science of verbal be­ havior has been so long delayed.

It has generally been assumed that to explain behavior, or any aspect of it, one must attribute it to events taking place inside the organism. In the field of verbal behavior this practice was once repre­ sented by the doctrine of the expression of ideas. An utterance was felt to be explained by setting forth the ideas which it expressed. If the speaker had had a different idea, he would have uttered different words or words in a different arrangement. If his utterance was unusual, it was because of the novelty or originality of his ideas. If it seemed empty, he must have lacked ideas or have been unable to put them into words. If he could not keep silent, it was because of the force of his ideas. If he spoke haltingly, it was because his ideas

7 VERBAL REHAVIOR 6 came slowly or were badly organized. And so on. All properties of verbal behavior seem to be thus accounted for.

Such a practice obviously has the same goal as a causal analysis, but it has by no means the same results. The difficulty is that the ideas for which sounds are said to stand as signs cannot be inde­ pendently observed. If we ask for evidence of their existence, we are likely to be given a restatement in other words; but a restate­ ment is no doser to the idea than the original utterance. Restatement merely shows that the idea is not identified with a single expression. It is, in fact, often defined as something common to two or more expressions. But we shall not arrive at this "something" even though we express an idea in every conceivable way.

Another common answer is to appeal to images. The idea is said to be what passes through the speaker's mind, what the speaker sees and hears and feels when he is "having" the idea. Explorations of the thought processes underlying verbal behavior have been at­ tempted by asking thinkers to describe experiences of this nature. But although selected examples are sometimes convincing, only a small part of the ideas said to be expressed in words can be identified with the kind o~ se~sory event upon which the notion of image rests. A book on physics 1s much more than a description of the images in the minds of physicists.

. There _is obviously something suspicious in the ease with which we discover ma set of ideas precisely those properties needed to account !or the be.havior which expresses them. We evidently construct the ideas at will from the behavior to be explained Th · f . . ere 1s, o course, no ~eal e:'planat1on. When we say that a remark is confusing because t?e idea is unclear, we seem to be talking about two levels of observa­ tion although th~re is, in fact, only one. It is the remark which is un- clear. The practice may have been defensible wh · · · · b en mqmnes mto ver. al proce~es were philosophical rather than scientific, and when a science of ideas could be imagined which wo Id d . u some ay put the matter m better order; but it stands in a differ t 1· h d · · en ig t to ay It 1s the f unction of an explanatory fiction to allay · · · . · · curiosity and to brmg mqmry to an end. The doctrine of ideas hash d th· ff · · . a is e ect by appear- mg to assign important problems of verbal b h · f .d e avior to a psychology o i eas. The problems have then seemed to b

the techniques of the student of language orpatssh eyonbd the range of • 0 ave ecome too 0 b scure to make further study profitable. -

Perhaps no one today is deceived by an ""d " i ea as an explanatory

A FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

fiction. Idioms and expressions which seem to explain verbal be­ havior in term of ideas are so common in our language that it is im­ possible to avoid them, but they may be little more than moribund figures of speech. The basic formulation, however, has been pre­ served. The immediate successor to "idea" was "meaning," and the place of the latter is in danger of being usurped by a newcomer, "in­ formation." These terms all have the same effect of discouraging a functional analysis and of supporting, instead, some of the practices first associated with the doctrine of ideas.

One unfortunate consequence is the belief that speech has an in­ dependent existence apart from the behavior of the speaker. Words are regarded as tools or instruments, analogous to the tokens, counters, or signal flags sometimes employed for verbal purposes. It is true that verbal behavior usually produces objective entities. The sound-stream of vocal speech, the words on a page, the signals trans­ mitted on a telephone or telegraph wire-these are records left by verbal behavior. As objective facts, they may all be studied, as they have been from time to time in linguistics, communication engineer­ ing, literary criticism, and so on. But although the formal properties of the records of utterances are interesting, we must preserve the dis­ tinction between an activity and its traces. In particular we must avoid the unnatural formulation of verbal behavior as the "use of words." We have no more reason to say that a man "uses the word water'' in asking for a drink than to say that he "uses a reach" in taking the offered glass. In the arts, crafts, and sports, especially where instruction is verbal, acts are sometimes named. We say that a tennis player uses a drop stroke, or a swimmer a crawl. No one is likely to be misled when drop strokes or crawls are referred to as things, but words are a different matter. Misunderstanding has been common, and often disastrous.

A complementary practice has been to assign an independent exist­ ence to meanings. "Meaning," like "idea," is said tQ be something expressed or communicated by an utterance. A meaning explains the occurrence of a particular set of words in the sense that if there had been a different meaning to be expressed, a different set of words would have been used. An utterance will be affected according to whether a meaning is clear or vague, and so on. The concept has cer­ tain advantages. Where "ideas" (like "feelings" and "desires," which are also said to be expressed by words) must be inside the organism,

8 9 VERBAL BEHAVIOR

there is a promising possibility that meanings may be kept ou~side the skin. In this sense, they are as observable as any part of physi~. .

But can we identify the meaning of an utterance in an objective way? A fair argument may be made in the case of proper nouns, and some common nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs-roughly the words with respect to which the doctrine of ideas could be supported by the appeal to images. But what about words like atom or gene or minus one or the spirit of the times where corresponding nonverbal entities are not easily discovered? And for words like nevertheless, although, and ouch! it has seemed necessary to look inside the or­ ganism for the speaker's intention, attitude, sentiment, or some other psychological condition.

Even the words which seem to fit an externalized semantic frame­ work are not without their problems. It may be true that proper nouns stand in a one-to-one correspondence with things, provided everything has its own proper name, but what about common nouns? What is the meaning of cat'! Is it some one cat, or the physical totality of all cats, or the class of all cats? Or must we fall back upon the idea of cat? Even in the case of the proper noun, a difficulty remains. As­ suming that there is only one man named Doe , is Doe himsel£ the meaning of Doe'! Certainly he is not conveyed or communicated when the word is used.

The existence of meanings becomes even more doubtful when we ad~an~e from _sin~le words to those collocations which " say some­ thing. What is said by a sentence is something more than what the words in it mean. Sentences do not merely refer to trees and skies and rain, they say something about them. This something is sometimes called a "propos~ti~n"-a som~~hat more respectable precursor of speech but very similar to the idea" which would have been said to be expressed b~ .the same sentence under the older doctrine. To define a proposiuon as "something which may be s ·d · l ,, ai in any an- guage does no~ tell us where propositions are, or of what stuff they are made. Nor 1s the problem solved by defining a · · 11 . proposition as a th e sentences which have the same meaning as . . . some one sentence, since we cannot identify a sentence as a memb f h' l · . . . er o t 1s c ass without knowmg its meamng-at which point we fi d l · . . n ourse ves facing our ongmal problem.

It has been tempting to try to establish th . . e separate existence of

wor d s an d meanings because a fairly el l · problems then becomes available. Theorieegat so ~t1on of certain

s O meaning usually deal

A FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

with corresponding arrays of words and things. How do the linguistic entities on one side correspond with the things or events which are their meanings on the other side, and what is the nature of the rela­ tion between them called "reference"? Dictionaries seem, at first blush, to support the notion of such arrays. But dictionaries do not give meanings; at best they give words having the same meanings. The semantic scheme, as usually conceived, has interesting properties. Mathematicians, logicians, and information theorists have explored possible modes of correspondence at length. For example, to what extent can the dimensions of the thing communicated be represented in the dimensions of the communicating medium? But it remains to be shown that such constructions bear any close resemblance to the products of genuine linguistic activities.

In any case the practice neglects many important properties of the original behavior, and raises other problems. We cannot successfully supplement a framework of semantic reference by appealing to the "intention of the speaker" until a satisfactory psychological account of intention can be given. If "connotative meaning" is to supplement a deficient denotation, study of the associative process is required. When some meanings are classed as "emotive," another difficult and relatively undeveloped psychological field is invaded. These are all efforts to preserve the logical representation by setting up additional categories for exceptional words. They are a sort of patchwork which succeeds mainly in showing how threadbare the basic notion is. When we attempt to supply the additional material needed in this repre­ sentation of verbal behavior, we find that our task has been set in awk­ ward if not impossible terms. The observable data have been pre­ empted, and the student of behavior is left with vaguely identified "thought processes."

The impulse to explicate a meaning is easily understood. We ask, "What do you mean?" because the answer is frequently helpful. Clarifications of meaning in this ·sense have an important place in every sort of intellectual endeavor. For the purposes of effective dis­ course the method of paraphrase usually suffices; we may not need extraverbal referents. But the explication of verbal behavior should not be allowed to generate a sense of scientific achievement. One has not accounted for a remark by paraphrasing "what it means."

We could no doubt define ideas, meanings, and so on, so that they would be scientifically acceptable and even useful in describing verbal behavior. But such an effort to retain traditional terms would

10 VERBAL BEHAVIOR

be costly. It is the general formulation which is wrong. We seek "causes" of behavior which have an acceptable scientific status and which, with luck, will be susceptible to measurement and manipula­ tion. To say that these are "all that is meant by" ideas or meanings is to misrepresent the traditional practice. We must find the functional relations which govern the verbal b ehavior to be explained; to call such relations "expression" or "communication" is to run the danger of introducing extraneous and misleading properties and events. The only solution is to reject the traditional formulation of verbal be­ havior in terms of meaning.

A NEW FORMULATION

The direction to be taken in an alternative approach is dictated by the task itself. Our first responsibility is simple description: what is the topography of this subdivision of human behavior? Once that question has been answered in at least a preliminary fashion we may advance to the stage called explanation: what conditions are rele­ vant to the occurrence of the behavior-what are the variables of which it is a function? Once these have been identified, we can ac­ count for the dynamic characteristics of verbal behavior within a framework appropriate to human behavior as a whole. At the same time, of course, we must consider the behavior of the listener. In re­ lating this to the behavior of the speaker, we complete our account of the verbal episode.

But this is only the beginning. Once a repertoire of verbal behavior ~as been set up, a host of new problems arise from the interaction of its parts .. Verbal beh~vior is usually the effect of multiple causes. Sepa­ rate variables c_ombme to extend their functional control, and new forms. of behavior emerge from the recombination of old fra ts All of this has appr~priate effects upon the listener, whose b:a:~

0 ;

then calls for analysis.

Still another set of problems arises from the fact ft · d h . , o en pomte out, t at a speaker is normally also a listener. He reacts t h · b . . . o is own e-h avior m several important ways. Part of what h · d e says 1s un er the control of other parts of his verbal behavior w f · ·

· · e re er to this mter- acuon when we say that the speaker qualifies ord l b · · , ers, or e a orates his b h avior at the moment it is produced Th e . .

· · · e mere cm1ss1on of re- sponses is an incomplete characterization when b h · ·

e av1or is composed As h anot er consequence of the fact that the sp k · . · · ea er 1s a so a listener, 1

A FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS 11

some of the behavior of listening resembles the behavior of speaking, particularly when the listener "understands" what is said.

The speaker and listener within the same skin engage in activities which are traditionally described as "thinking." The speaker manipu­ lates his behavior; he reviews it, and may reject it or emit it in modi­ fied form. The extent to which he does so varies over a wide range, determined in part by the extent to which he serves as his own lis­ tener. The skillful speaker learns to tease out weak behavior and to manipulate variables which will generate and strengthen new re­ sponses in his repertoire. Such behavior is commonly observed in the verbal practices of literature as well as of science and logic. An anal­ ysis of these activities, together with their effects upon the listener, leads us in the end to the role of verbal behavior in the problem of knowledge.

The present book sets forth the principal features of an analysis from this point of view. Part II sketches the topography of verbal behavior in relation to its controlling variables and Part III some of the consequences of the interaction of variables. Part IV describes the manipulation of verbal behavior in the act of composition, while Part V considers the activities involved in editing and in the creative production of behavior which are usually called verbal thinking. No assumption is made of any uniquely verbal characteristic, and the principles and methods employed are adapted to the study of human behavior as a whole. An extensive treatment of human behavior in general from the same point of view may be found ·elsewhere.2 The present account is self-contained.

One important feature of the analysis is that it is directed to the behavior of the individual speaker and listener; no appeal is made to statistical concepts based upon data derived from groups. Even with respect to the individual speaker or listener, little use is made of specific experimental results. The basic facts to be analyzed are well known to every educated person and do not need to be sub­ stantiated statistically or experimentally at the level of rigor here attempted. No effort has been made to survey the relevant "litera­ ture." The emphasis is upon an orderly arrangement of well-known facts in accordance with a formulation of behavior derived from an exre'rimental analysis of a more rigorous sort. The present extension to verbal behavior is thus an exercise in interpretation rather than a quantitative extrapolation of rigorous experimental results.

2 Skinner, B. F ., Science and Human Behavior (New York, 1954).

12 VERBAL BEHAVIOR

The lack of quantitative rigor is to some extent offset by an insist­ ence that the conditions appealed to in the analysis be, so far as possible, accessible and manipulable. The formulation is inherently practical and suggests immediate technological applications at almost every step. Although the emphasis is not upon experimental or sta­ tistical facts, the book is not theoretical in the usual sense. It makes no appeal to hypothetical explanatory entities. The ultimate aim is the prediction and control of verbal behavior.

Chapter 2

General Problems

VERBAL BEHAVIOR AS A DEPENDENT VARIABLE

Oua SUBJECT matter is verbal behavior, and we must accept this in the crude form in which it is observed. In studying speech, we have to account for a series of complex muscular activities which produce noises. In studying writing or gesturing, we deal with other sorts of muscular responses. It has long been recognized that this is the stuff of which languages are made, but the acknowledgement has usu­ ally been qualified in such a way as to destroy the main point. As Jespersen .1 said many years ago, "The only unimpeachable definition of a word is that it is a human habit." Unfortunately, he felt it neces­ sary to add, "an habitual act on the part of one human individual which has, or may have, the effect of evoking some idea in the mind of another individual." Similarly, Bertrand Russell 2 asserts that "just as jumping is one class of movement .. . so the word 'dog' is [another] class," but he adds that words differ from other classes of bodily move­ ments because they have "meaning." In both cases something has been added to an objective description.

It is usually argued that the addition is necessary, even when behav­ ior is not verbal. Any effort to deal with behavior as a movement of the parts of an organism meets at once the objection that it cannot be mere movement which· is important but rather what the move­ ment means, either to the behaving organism or to the observer. I t is usually asserted that we can see meaning or purpose in behavior and should not omit it from our account. But meaning is not a prop­ erty of behavior as such but of the conditions under which behavior

1 Jespersen, 0., Language (New York, 1922). 2 Russell, B., Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (New York, 1940).

15

VERBAL BEHAVIOR

occurs. Technically, meanings are to be found among the in~e­ pendent variables in a functional account, rather than as properties of the dependent variable. When someone says that he can see th~ meaning of a response, he means that he can infer some of the van­ ables of which the response is usually a function. The issue is particu­ larly important in the field of verbal behavior where the concept of meaning enjoys unusual prestige.

In defining verbal behavior as behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons we do not, and cannot, specify any one form, mode, or medium. Any movement capable of affecting another organism may be verbal. We are likely to single out vocal behavior, not only because it is commonest, but because it has little effect upon the physical environment and hence is almost necessarily verbal. But there are extensive written languages, sign languages, and languages in which the "speaker" stimulates the skin of the " listener." Audible behavior which is not vocal (for example, clapping the hands for a servant, or blowing a bugle) and gestures are verbal, although they may not compose an organized language. The skilled telegraphist behaves verbally by moving his wrist. Some of these forms normally arise only after vocal behavior has been established, but this is not necessarily so. Writing and typing may be either primordially verbal or transcriptions of a prior vocal form. Pointing to words is verbal­ as, indeed, is all pointing, since it is effective only when it alters the behavior of someone. The definition also covers manipulations of physical objects which are undertaken because of the effect upon people, as m the use of ceremonial trappings. In the case of any medium, the behavior is both verbal and nonverbal at once-non­ verbal in the effect upon the medium-verbal in the ultimate effect upon the observer. Ceremonial languages, and the languages of flowers, g~ms, and so on, are of little interest, because they have small vocabularies and little or no grammar but th h l , ey are nevert e ess verbal under the terms of the definition. Because 1 b 1 b

· · h voca ver a e-h av1or 1s t e commonest form we may deal · th · · , w1 1t as representative. Where necessary or helpful parallel problem · h f

'd d ' s 1n ot er orms may b e cons1 ere .

VOCAL BEHAVIOR

Vocal verbal behavior is executed by an · h d' h h extensive musculature-

t e iap ragm, t e vocal cords, the false vocal c d l the soft palate, the tongue, the cheek the 1. dor s, .t

1e epiglottis, ' ips, an the Jaw. The most

GENERAL PROBLEMS

complete record of a single instance of an utterance would be an electrical or mechanical report of the action of all the muscles in­ volved. At the moment this is of theoretical interest only, since noth­ ing like it has ever been made. Fortunately, a science of verbal behavior need not wait. The complex muscular responses of vocal behavior affect the verbal environment by producing audible "speech." This is a much more accessible datum.

The acoustic product of vocal verbal behavior may be recorded phonographically. The record may be converted into visible form and analyzed for greater convenience into pitch-intensity spectra. The acoustic report is less accurate than a report of muscular action because different muscular patterns presumably produce the same sounds, but it is at least feasible. It is also more convenient because it uses fewer terms or dimensions. Probably nothing of importance is lost, because the scientist stands in essentially the same position as the listener and for many purposes may ignore any property of verbal behavior which does not produce a difference in the sound-stream. Even so, an acoustic report tells us more than we usually want to know, except when acoustic details are to be specially emphasized, and it soon becomes awkward.

Another kind of record was made possible by the discovery that speech could be broken into constituent sounds and by the invention of a phonetic alphabet to represent these sounds. (Both of these ad­ vances, of course, antedated scientific study.) A sample of verbal be­ havior can be recorded by placing appropriate symbols in a corres­ ponding order, as is done, however inexactly, in writing with the Eng­ lish alphabet. So far as we are concerned here, such a record simply makes it possible to identify some of the acoustic properties of an ut­ terance. The transcription permits the reader to construct a facsimile of the behavior which will have the same effect upon the verbal com­ munity as the original sample. It is a practical and economical record, because an indefinite number of different acoustic events may be represented with a few symbols. .

This use of a phonetic alphabet makes no commitments about the functional significance of the units identified. We may use Eng­ lish spelling to record bird calls (to-whit, to-7:1hoo, or peewee): or the noises of inanimate things (pop and boom), m the sense ~h~t m read­ ing such records aloud one constructs a reasonable f~cs1mile of the original songs or noises. But this does not mean that birds and drums speak in English "phonemes." The analytical (rather than tran-

16 VERBAL BEHAVIOR

scriptive) function of the phoneme in modern linguistics arises, on the one hand, from an excursion into phonology which will not have to be made here and, on the other, from the study and comparison of the practices of whole verbal communities. The linguist is concerned with such facts as these: ( i ) in one verbal community the responses pin and bin have different effects or occur under different conditions, while in another verbal community they have the same effect or occur under the same conditions; (2) in one verbal community the re­ sponses pit and bit have different effects or occur under different cir­ cumstances, while in another verbal community they have the same effect or occur under the same circumstances; (3) in that community in which pin and bin have the same effect, pit and bit also have the same effect; and in that community in which pin and bin have differ­ ent effects, pit and bit also have different effects. These facts present problems which lie beyond the mere transcription of verbal behavior, because they include references to the conditions of occurrence of verbal behavior or to effects upon a listener. We shall deal wilh these additional facts in another way here.

A record of an utterance in a phonetic alphabet provides, of co urse, less information about its properties than an acoustic report, but there should be no objection if we can show that the properties which have been preserved are the effective properties of verbal behavior. This ~r~ngs ~s to an important principle in the analysis of behavior. We d1stmgu~sh between an instance of a response and a class of re­ spo1:15es. A smgle resl?°nse, as an instance of the activity of an or­ gamsm, may be desc~ibed as fully as facilities will permit. But when "'.e are_ concer_ned with the prediction of future behavior it may be either impossible to predict the great detail of the · l · . . smg e instance or, more hkely, ummportant to do so. All we want to know is whether or not a response of a given class will occur By "of · l " . . a given c ass we mean a response showmg certain selected properties. We may want to know whether a man will open a door although w d h h e o not care ow

e turns the knob. We do not dismiss the deta·1 f . . i s o tummg the knob as unlawful or undetermmed· we simply deal "th h ' . · ' wi 1s opening the d oor without accounting for them Th

· f . . · e property of behavior by virtue o which we classify a response as "o enin a " . . cipal interest. In the same way, we do not !ed t! k door is our pn_n­ of a vocal response so long as the sound now all the details

. . -pattern which · t od achieves a given effect upon a specified b l I pr uces

. ver a commun·t Th are many practical and theoretical reasons f . I y. ere

or recording and analyz-

GENERAL PROBLEMS

ing given instances of vocal behavior in as great detail as possible, but they do not coincide with our interests in the prediction and control of verbal behavior, at least in the present. state of the science. The "phoneme" was an early recognition of the principle of the defining property of a response. Unfortunately for our present pur­ poses the extension of the concept to historical and comparative linguistics has obscured its relevance in defining a unit of verbal behavior in the individual speaker.

The problem of the speech-sound becomes somewhat clearer, and perhaps loses some of its importance, when we compare other modes of behavior. If verbal behavior were never vocal, there would be no sciences of phonology and phonetics. Yet most of the problems to be considered in the study of verbal behavior would remain. In a com­ munity in which all verbal behavior was written, we should have to identify "speech-marks," and discover their essential geometric prop­ erties. If such a language resembled modern script, we should have to study a large number of marks which functioned as, say, the letter a in order to identify their common features and to discover what properties could for most purposes be ignored. If such a community spoke only with typewriters, the range of properties would be narrow. The advantage of a narrow range for the reader, as well as the scien­ tist, is suggested by the frequent instruction " Please print." Graph­ ology provides a rudimentary "phonetics" of written verbal behavior; here again the "significances" require other techniques of analysis.

A "direct quotation" is a record of verbal behavior which depends more explicitly upon a knowledge of the conditions under which the behavior occurred. It is often, however, little more than an acoustic or phonetic transcription which permits the reader to reconstruct relevant properties of the original behavior. The spoken report that someone said It is four o'clock actually reconstructs an instance of verbal behavior. A written report permits the reader to reconstruct

it for himself. A technique which permits the reconstruction of a datum is un-

usual. Science does not generally resort to models or mimicry; its descriptions of events do not resemble those events. In the field of nonverbal behavior we usually do not report behavior by imitating it. Yet in speaking a language under study the scientist uses mimicry in lieu of the more usual method of description which bears no point­ to-point correspondence with the thing described. (This distinction

19 VERBAL BEHAVIOR

is discussed further in Chapter 5.) Russell 3 has pointed out that some rare instances of verbal behavior, such as the Coronation Oath or the Lord's Prayer, have proper names. He also mentions the method, due to Godel, of assigning numbers to words and hence to all possible sentences. The indexing system in a library assigns proper names (identifying numbers) to the large samples of verbal behavior known as books. It is not probable, however, that these foreshadow a de­ scriptive system in which all verbal responses will be given names which bear no greater resemblances to the things named than the resemblances between events and descriptions in science elsewhere.

No matter how tempting it may be to utilize the special possibility of phonetic transcription or direct quotation to reconstruct the be­ havior being analyzed, it must be emphasized that from the point of view of scientific method an expression such as It is four o'clock is the name of a response. It is obviously not the response being studied, because that was made by someone else at some other time. It simply resembles ~h.at response in point of form. The conditions responsible for the onginal response may not share anything in common with th~ ~ondit~ons. respo~sible for the response on the part of the de­ sc:1b1~g scientist. This practice, called hypostasis, is an anomaly in SC1ent1fic method. The field of verbal behavior is distinguished by the f~ct. that the na~es of the things with which it deals are acoustically similar to t~e ~hmgs thems?lves. As Quine• has said, "A quotation is not a. ~escr.ip~10n, but a hieroglyph; it designates its object not by descnbmg lt m terms of other ob1·ects, but by picturing ·t" Q · · k. h 1 . ume 1s spea mg ~re of_ the. written report of written verbal behavior. In no other sc.ience is this possible, because in no other science do names and the thmgs named have similar structures. ~ quotati?n _is usually something more than an acoustic or pho-

netic transcnpt1on, hieroglyph or name In th fi I · th h · . b ' · e rst p ace, 1t usually, . oug not mevita ly, breaks a fairly continuous sample of behavior mto parts. Such breaks need not reflect actual · f h pauses or other prop- erties o t e temporal or stress pattern of th b h . .

h · d e e av10r. In quotmg a speec ep1so e, we separate it not only into h ds s t d b 1 b . speec -soun repre- en e y etters, ut mto larger units call d d ,

d b · e wor s or sentences represente y spatial breaks or punctuation Th d. ff , 1 a phonetic report and d. . ·. e erence between

a nect quotation is se . h . . needed in the two cases A II h . en m t e trammg

. sma p oneuc repertoire will suffice to a Russell, B., Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (N 'Quine, W. V., Mathematical Logic (New York e)w York, 1940).

• 1940 • p. 26.

GENERAL PROBLEMS

transcribe English speech for purposes of reconstruction. But thou­ sands of different "words" must be learned before direct quotations can effectively be written down. The process includes, of course, "learning to spell" and, in particular, to distinguish between homo­ phones. The ability is generally acquired in the process of learning to write and, once acquired, is often taken for granted. We are likely to overlook the fact that a process of analysis is actually taking place.

We are also likely to overlook the fact that in a direct quotation we are inferring something about the conditions under which a response was emitted, or about characteristic effects on a listener. A fairly good phonetic transcription may be made of a language one does not speak, or, as the stenographer often shows, of a familiar language without otherwise reacting as a listener. But the units of direct quotation specify verbal responses as units under functional control. In making a distinction between through and threw, or between Send me two and Send me, too we are specifying either the normal conditions under which the responses are made or their normal effects upon a listener. In the indirect quotation greater emphasis is placed upon these additional variables. He said that he would go permits only a very rough reconstruction of an actual verbal response; only "go" has survived from the possible original I will go, and we cannot even be sure that another response characteristic of the same situation was not actually made. But we know with some certainty what kind of situation it was and what kind of effect the remark could have had.

A UNIT OF VERBAL BEHAVIOR

From the muscular or acoustic record of verbal behavior we pass through phonetic transcription to direct and indirect quotation. As we do so, we retain less and less information about the specific in­ stance. This loss of detail can be tolerated if properties essential for prediction continue to be described. At the same time we begin to add inferences or facts about the conditions under which the response was made. In undertaking to predict or control verbal behavior, we must, of course, take such additional variables into account, but their status must be clarified. Traditional units of verbal behavior never make a sharp distinction between observed and inferred. Consider, for example, the concept of "word." As used by the layman and by many linguists, a word may be nothing more than an utterance ("I want a word with you" or "The last word"), or a conventional sub-

21 VERBAL BEHA VJOR 20

division of an utterance ("What would be two or three words in English is often only one in German"), or a supposed or real objective counter or token ("to choose a word" or "to string words together"), or something common to two or more modes of behavior (' 'a word may be either spoken or written"). With less justification we even speak of the same word in two languages ("French and English use the same word for 'accord' "), or in two historical stages of the same language, or in two cognate forms (" 'adamant' is the same word as 'dia­ mond' "). Sometimes "word" seems to mean merely a standard lexical design ("the word 'fast' ").

What is needed for present purposes-and what the traditional "word" occasionally approximates-is a unit of behavior composed of a response of identifiable form functionally related to one or more independent variables. In traditional terms we might say that we need a unit of behavior defined in terms of both "form and meaning." The analysis of nonverbal behavior has clarified the nature of such a unit under laboratory conditions in which the expediency of the unit may be submitted to rigorous checks. An extrapolation of this concept to t~e verbal field is central to the analysis represented by ~he rest of this book. The kinds of behavior in which we are usually mt~rested have, as we have seen, an effect upon the environment w.hi~h h~s a return effect upon the organism. Such behavior may be ~istmgmshed from activities which are primarily concerned with the internal econo~y of the organism by calling activities which operate upo!'1 t~e environ.ment "operant behavior." Any unit of such be­ havior 1s conveniently called "an operant" F .. ,, . . . or most purposes

operant 1s m.terchangeable with the traditional "response," but the te~ms ~ermit us to make the distinction between an instance of behav10r ,,< So-and-s_o smoked a cigarette between 2 :oo and : 10 P.M. 2 r.esterday) _and a kind of behavior ("cigarette smoking"). The tenn

response 1s often used for both of these alth h . d h . . oug 1t oes not carry

t e second me~nmg easily. The description of an instance of behavior does not require a description of related vari·abl f f . l

I · Th es or o a uncttona re at10n. e term operant, on the other hand . . the prediction and co t f k. , is concerned with I . n ro o a ind of behavior. Although we ob- serve only instances, we are concerned . h 1 .

d . · · . Wlt aws which specify kinds Th e istmction raises the issue of f 1· . . orma ism A re instance, can be completely described as a or. spons~, as an operant specifies at least on . ~ m of behavior. An 1 . e re auon to a vanabl - h ff . the behavior characteristically tho h e t e e ect which

' ug perhaps not inevitably, has

GENERAL PROBLEMS

upon the environment-and is therefore not a purely formal unit. A formal specification cannot be avoided, since a response can be said to be an instance of an operant only through objective identification. But identification is not enough. As an instance of a verbal operant, the response must occur as a function of a certain variable. In this way we may distinguish between the operant fast in which the con­ trolling variable is shared by the operant speedy and the operant fast in which the controlling variable is similar to that in the operant fixed.

A long-standing problem in the analysis of verbal behavior is the size of the unit. Standard linguistic units are of various sizes. Below the level of the word lie roots and affixes or, more rigorously, the small "meaningful" units called morphemes. Above the word come phrases, idioms, clauses, sentences, and so on. Any one of these may have functional unity as a verbal operant. A bit of behavior as small as a single speech-sound, or even a pitch or stress pattern, may be under independent control of a manipulable variable (we shall see evidence of such "atomic" verbal operants later). On the other hand, a large segment of behavior-perhaps a phrase like vast majority or when all is said and done or the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth or a whole sentence such as Haste makes waste-may be shown to vary under a similarly unitary functional control. Although parts of these larger operants have the same form as parts of other operants or even of whole units, there may be no functional inter­ action. If this seems at odds with traditional linguistic analysis, it must be remembered that the verbal operant is exclusively a unit of behavior in the individual speaker. The functional unity of a large operant and the extent to which the presence of that operant in the repertoire of the speaker may affect operants of similar form must be decided by a study of the behavior of that speaker. In the practices characteristic of a verbal community, it may not be possible to estab­ lish the functional unity of a similar large sample of behavior.

We observe that a speaker possesses a verbal repertoire in the sense that responses of various forms appear in his behavior from time to time in relation to identifiable conditions. A repertoire, as a collec­ tion of verbal operants, describes the potential behavior of a speaker. To ask where a verbal operant is when a response is not in the course of being emitted is like asking where one's knee-jerk is when the physician is not tapping the patellar tendon. A repertoire of verbal

22 VERBAL BEHAVIOR

behavior is a convenient construct. The distinction between " verbal operant" and "word" is ma tched by that between " verbal repertoire" and "vocabulary." A person is said to possess a vocabulary of so many thousands of words if these words are observed in his verbal behavior during a period of time. But a vocabulary is usually regarded as a warehouseful of inanimate tools from which the sp eaker makes appro­ priate selections as he speaks. We are concerned here not only with the fact that certain specific forms of verbal behavior are observed but that they are observed under specific circumstances. These control­ ling circumstances add a dynamic character to "re pertoire" which is lacking in "vocabulary."

PROBABILITY OF RESPONSE

Some parts of a verbal repertoire are more likely to occur than others. This likelihood is an extremely important, thoug h difficult, conception. Our basic datum is not the occurrence of a given re· sponse as such, but the probability that it will occur at a given time. Every verbal operant may be conceived of as having under specified circumstances an assignable probability of emission-conveniently called its "strength." We base the notion of streng th upon several kinds of evidence.

EMISSION OF RESPONSE

. If~ response ~s emitted at all, the operant is p robably strong. Emis­ sion 1s a better sign of strength, however, if the circumstances are unu­ sual. In one typ': of verbal sl.ip, for example, the r esponse which in­ tru~es upo? or ~1sto~ts behavior (see Chapter 11 ) is n ot appropria te to the 1mmediat~ s1tuat1on and therefore appears to be especially strong. ~ response which appears under inappropriate, difficult, or ambiguous c1rcum~tan~es but is not a slip is probably strong for the same r eason. The sc1e~t1st w~o continues to talk shop during a thrilling football g~me or ma no.isy subway and the steamrolling conversationalist who will brook no interruption give evidence of · 11 . espec1a y strong reper- toires. Other forms of verbal behavior-for l · ·

·d f h examp e, wntmg- present ev1 ence o t e same sort.

Amo~g the u~usual circumstances which give evidence of strength we may mclude madequate verbal stimuli. from th f h h' · . • e act t at one sees

is nai:ne m u_nclear or br~efly exposed printed material o r hears hi.~ name m a n01sy conversat10n in a room . f name in his own repertoire. we m er the strength of his

GENERAL PROBLEMS

ENERGY· LEVEL

Emission of a response is an all-or-none measure. It enables us to infer strength only in terms of the adequacy of the conditions under which emission occurs. A second sort of evidence suggests that strength lies along a continuum from zero to a very high value. A re­ sponse may be executed with a certain energy, which is not to be confused with "strength" as a synonym for "probability." Energy seems to vary with probability, and is frequently accepted as a meas­ ure of strength. 5 An energetic and prolonged NO! is not only a strong response, it suggests a strong tendency to respond which would not easily be overcome by competing forces. On the other hand, a timid brief No is accepted as an instance of a weak operant from which we infer some inadequacy in the independent variables. Relative energy permits a similar inference. From the response a RED kite we con­ clude that the redness was of special importance to the speaker, while from a red KITE we infer the special effectiveness of the kite itself as a variable. Under certain circumstances, a change in energy level may take place rapidly, as in the case of Mr. Winkle in the Pickwick Papers, who, just before falling into an alcoholic sleep, cried,

"Let's- have-'nother-bottle," commencing in a very loud key, and end­ ing in a very faint one .

Other properties of verbal behavior vary with the energy level. At low levels the part of the response which produces " voicing" drops out to leave the familiar whisper. At the other end of the continuum other topographical properties are affected. Probably because of the mechanism of the speech apparatus, the pitch level of a response tends to vary with the energy. Other things being equal, the louder the response the higher the pitch. Pitch level may therefore sometimes be taken as an indicator of strength. In the behavior of young children the low and scarcely audible "proper remark" upon a social occasion and high-pitched playground shouting suggest the range of possible values. Other forms of verbal behavior generally have a more limited range. In written verbal behavior some indication of strength may be found in the size of letters, pressure of the pen, underlining, and so on. Some allowance for comparable characteristics is made in the de-

' It is possible that energy and probability <=?·vary only after the e~ergy of the response has been differentially reinforced (ace Science and Human Behav,or, P· 95) ,

25 VERBAL BEHAVIOR 24 sign of type. These are now mainly conventional devices, but they retain some trace of an original variation with operant strength .

SPEED

Another property of emitted verbal behavior is the speed with which successive parts of a sample follow one anothe r or the speed with which a response appears after th e occasion for it has arisen. In general we accept the implication that strong verbal b ehavior is rapid and that hesitant speech indicates little strength . A ready answer is one which the speaker is "strongly inclined to make"; a delay in an­ swering leads us to suspect that something is possibly amiss in the controlling circumstances. The weakness may be due to competitive behavior. A man deeply engrossed in a book may respond to a call or a question with delays of the order of several seconds. In young children, when verbal behavior is weak because it is still in the process of being acquired, delays of the order of minutes are some­ times observed. A child thirteen months old had acquired the re­ ~fonse ~i~ht. Upo~ one occasion he was shown a lig ht and asked, ~hat is it? What is that?" He made n o response for at least a full·

mmute, and the attempt to get him to respond was given up. He had tum~d to play :'ith a toy when the response came out clearly. In path­ ological ~ehav10r delays may be still greater. An early report of an example is du~ to H_ead, 6 who asked o ne of his aphasic patients to count. The patient did not reply until ten minutes had passed when he suddenly began One two three four w · ' · f , , , , . . . . . e some times m er th_e stren_gth of the verbal behavior of a correspondent from the speed with which a letter is answered and traces of speed · h d · ·

I · ·i . ' m an wntmg supp~ su~i ar_evidence. The frantic gesture exemplifies speed of re- sponding m still another mode of verbal behavior.

REPETITION

A third possible indication of relative strength is the . d' etition of 1mme 1ate rep-a response. Instead of saying NO, . h may say No' N , N , A · wit great energy one thousand ti~e/~o' oE sort ofdwholesale repetition is implied in A . II . . . · nergy an repetition may be combined Occa-

s1ona y lt is possible to observe a d 1 · . . sponses drop off in energy . I ec me m streng th as suc c.:essive re-

, pitc 1, and speed· NO' ,0 , N , R . tion is apparently responsible fo · · N : o. no. epetl· 1 special emphasis-for exam Cr a c ass of expressio ns which imply 1 p e, ome, come come and N E

• Head, Henry, Aphasia (New York, •926). , ow, now. X·

GENERAL PROBLEMS

pressions such as again and again, round and round, and miles and miles are complicated by an additional principle but probably also show the effect of strength. A very, very sad mistake serves in place of A VERY sad mistake. Repetition may be diluted by intervening be­ havior. In the response No, it's not. Not at all. It's not a question of what I think the exceptional strength of the form not is evident in its repetition.

LIMITATIONS ON EVIDENCE OF STRENGTH

• It is easy to overestimate the significance of these indicators. If two or more properties of behavior indicate the same thing, they must vary together; but energy, speed, and repetitiveness do not always satisfy this test. We classify people according to the general strength of their verbal behavior in a way which suggests that our measures are closely associated. For example, the garrulous person (when he is garrulous) talks loudly, rapidly, and repeats himself, while the taci­ turn man speaks slowly, quietly, and seldom repeats. But in single instances these measures are altered through other circumstances, and the exceptions must be explained. For example, a poorly memorized answer may be delayed because of its weakness, but during the delay the aversive character of the situation increases, and when the re­ sponse is finally emitted the energy level may be high. The apparent discrepancy between delay and force of response requires a special account.

Another complication is that our measures-energy level, speed of response, and even repetition-enter into the construction of different forms of response. In English this presents no great difficulty. Abso­ lute levels of pitch and intensity are not "distinctive," nor are relative pitch levels important. Changes in pitch, however, distinguish differ­ ent types of utterance. Energy of response cannot be taken as an inevitable indicator of strength so long as it serves to make DE-sert a different response from de-SERT. The prolonging of a sound does not necessarily mean strength when it serves as "quantity," nor is redu- plication always a useful instance of repetition of form. . .

Energy, speed, and repetitiveness are all affected by special condi­ tions of reinforcement. We speak more energetically to the deaf and more slowly to anyone who has difficulty in followi_ng us; a~d we re­ peat in both cases. Repetition may be needed agamst a noisy back­ ground (Hear ye! Hear ye!). To someone at a distance we raise the

VERBAL BEHAVIOR ~6 energy and pitch of our voice and prolong each sound when possible. A quick loud response is more likely to get results in a competitive situation, for example, in reciting in a classroom. We can allow for special conditions of this sort in evaluating any given measure only by inferring operant strength, not from the fact that one speaks loudly, but from the fact that he speaks at an energy level above that which would ordinarily prevail under the same circumstances. There is some consolation in the fact that changes in strength due to these special conditions usually exaggerate " natural" strength. They may lead us to mistake the relative importance of an indicator but not its direction or sign.

Unfortunately other kinds of consequences oppose normal evi­ dences of strength. Extreme values of any of these properties interfere with the effect upon the listener. The verbal community, as a collec­ tion of listeners, forces speech toward a standard level of speed, energy, and repetitiveness. If a child speaks loudly, he is told not to shout. If he mumbles, he is told to speak up. If he hesitates, he is told to hurry. If his words come tumbling out, he is told to be deliberate. To repeat oneself is bad form, and the double negative which is mere_ly t~e innocent result of a strong No, is called un~mmatical and illogical.

. But if th~ indicators are somewhat obscured by these con fli cting ~nterests, evidence of strength still survives. We still make ractical mf~r~nces about a speaker's behavior from his energy, speedp and re­ ~e~itiveness. A complete levelling to a monotone is not achi~ved and is hm ~ct aflso opposed by the community. In some kinds of verbal b e avior- or example in r d · b h . ' ea mg a 1 oud-the controlling variable genfaera~l~s e av1or at a fairly constant level of strength Except for un mi iar or poorly l d · strengthen one respo earnbe responses, a text ordinarily does not

nse a ove another B t . · f · u a sen es of responses of um orm energy and speed is not eff t. reader is therefore d e~ ive upon the listener. The

encourage to mtrod . . strength. He reads as if his b h . uce spurious signs of

e avior were determin d b but by an assortment of variabl . . e , not ya text,

. . es s1mi 1 ar to those in " I" h N ow 1t is significant that he d h" rea speec .

oes t is by modulat. . h .and speed. From these indi t f mg pttc , energy,

. ca ors o strength th 1· . plausible set of determining d' . e 1stener infers a ". con ttlons The re d h interpretation." · a er as shown good

We also supply indicators for other reasons. If we are shown a

GENERAL PROBLEMS

prized work of art and exclaim Beautiful!, the speed and energy of the response will not be lost on the owner. We may accentuate the effect by using repetition: Beautiful, beautiful, simply beautiful! This is so fully understood by everyone that it becomes part of a culture to simulate characteristics of strength whether appropriate independent variables are present or not-whether the picture is an occasion upon which such verbal behavior would naturally be strong. This would scarcely be the case if the significance of our indicators had been entirely obscured by other considerations.

OvER·ALL FREQUENCY'

A third type of evidence is the over-all frequency with which a response appears in a large sample of verbal behavior. For example, the number of times a speaker emits I, me, my, and mine is sometimes taken to indicate the strength of his behavior with respect to himself as a controlling variable-his " egocentricity" or "conceit." Other re­ sponses have been used to indicate other themes. With such a meas­ ure it can be shown that a writer's interests change from year to year­ that he becomes more or less preoccupied with sex, death, or any other subject. The practice recognizes the general notion of a varying probability of response and the relevance of an over-all frequency in measuring it, but such interpretations depend upon certain assump­ tions which are not always justified.

Word counts are often attempts to develop a purely formal analysis of the dependent variable alone. Verbal behavior is studied without regard to the circumstances under which it is emitted. But although it may be useful to know that a response of a given form is frequently emitted, it is also important to know the prevailing conditions. Since our unit of analysis is not purely formal, we cannot be sure that all instances of a response are instances of the same operant. Nor can we be sure that frequency is not primarily attributable to the frequency of occurrence of controlling variables. In the case of egocentricity, the speaker himself is always present and his changing inclination to talk about that subject may be significant; but a response such as snow presumably varies with the seasons. A change in frequency may not reflect a changing tendency to "talk about snow when snow is pres­ ent" but merely certain changing circumstances. Even the frequency of responses such as I , me, my, and mine may vary as a function of the listener to whom the verbal behavior is addressed. Unless we know that such a listener remains present or absent, a change in frequency

29 VERBAL BEHAVIOR

cannot be used to infer a change in an underlying tendency to emit such forms.

Although over-all frequencies are interesting and often satisfactory data, they depart from our program of dealing with the individual speaker upon a given occasion. The data are more often relevant to studies of characteristic practices of a given verbal community, and hence to the commoner preoccupations of linguistics. Nevertheless, use may sometimes be made of such data in inferring characteristic processes in the individual speaker.

PROBABILITY AND THE SINGLE INSTANCE

Although the English language contains many expressions which suggest that the concept of probability of response is a familiar and useful one, certain problems remain to be solved in using it in the analysis of behavior. Under laboratory conditions probability of re­ sponse i_s easily studied in an individual organism as frequency of responding. Under these conditions simple changes in frequency can be shown to be precise functions of specific variables, and such studies supply some of the most reliable facts about behavior now available. ~ut we need to move on from the study of frequencies to a considera­ tion o_f the probability of a single event. The problem is by no means pec~har to the field of behavior. It is a basic one wherever the data of a science are probabilistic, and this means the physical sciences in g~ner~l. Althou~h the data upon which both the layman and the s~ient1st base their concepts of probability are in the form of frequen ­ cies, both want to talk about the probability of a single forthcoming ~vent. _In later chapte~s in this book we shall want to consider the way m which seve~al variables, combining at a given time, contribute strength to a given response. In doing so we may appear to be oin ;ell b?on! a freq~enc?' interpretation of probability, yet ou! e} _ence or t e contnbution of each variabl . b d

t1ons of frequencies alone. e is ase upon observa-

INDEPENDENT VARIABL ES AND RELATED PROCESSES

The probability that a verbal res n E • • a given time is the basic dat r se O given form will occur at the "dependent variable" · um tfo e _predicted and controlled. It is

m a uncttonal 1 · and events to which we tum · d _ana ysis. The conditions

m or er to achieve d · · -the "indept:ndent variables" pre 1ct1on or control

-must now be considered.

GENERAL PROBLEMS

CoNDmONING AND EXTINCTION

Any operant, verbal or otherwise, acquires strength and continues to be maintained in strength when responses are frequently followed by the event called "reinforcement." The process of "operant con­ ditioning" is most conspicuous when verbal behavior is first acquired. The parent sets up a repertoire of responses in the child by reinforc­ ing many instances of a response. Obviously, a response must appear at least once before it is strengthened by reinforcement. It does not follow, however, that all the complex forms of adult behavior are in the child's unconditioned vocal repertoire. The parent need not wait for the emergence of the final form. Responses of great intricacy can be constructed in the behavior of an organism through a proce­ dure illustrated by the following demonstration experiment. We undertake to condition a pigeon to pace the floor of its cage in the pattern of a figure-8. Let us assume that the pigeon is hungry and that we can present food quickly and conveniently as a reinforcer. We need not wait until a figure-8 emerges in its entirety in order to rein­ force the behavior. We begin by reinforcing any behavior which is part of the final pattern. In case the pigeon remains relatively im­ mobile, we may have to begin by reinforcing any slight movement. The bird will soon become active, though as yet in no particular pat­ tern. We then withhold reinforcement until the bird begins turning in one specific direction, let us say clockwise. The slightest movement in this direction is immediately reinforced. Later, reinforcement is withheld until an extensive movement is made. Complete circular movements soon appear. This is half the desired result. The operant is then partially extinguished as reinforcements are withheld until the bird turns in a counterclockwise direction. It may be necessary to reinforce an occasional clockwise movement. Eventually the bird makes complete turns in both directions. The two parts of the pattern are now available but not yet in the required order. It is now possible to wait for a single figure-8 pattern before reinforcing. Under suitable conditions, the final relatively complex performance can be achieved in a short period of time.

In teaching the young child to talk, the formal specifications upon which reinforcement is contingent are at first greatly relaxed. Any response which vaguely resembles the standard behavior of the com­ munity is reinforced. When these begin to appear frequently, a closer

30 approximation is insisted upon. In this manner ve

VERBAL BEHAVIOR

ry complex verbal forms may be reached. (We shall see in Chapter 4 that. there ai:e other ways of evoking a complex response i°: or~er .~o. reinforce lt. The present method of "progressive approx1mat1on 1s ~sually relevant only in the early stages of setting up a verbal repertoire.)

If the contingencies of reinforcement are for any reason ever relaxed, the properties of the verbal response undergo a change in the other direction. The degeneration of the forms of military com· mands is an example. Consider a sergeant with a new squad to be conditioned to follow his commands. The sergeant begins with a verbal response borrowed from the larger verbal community, for example, the response March! At first this may need to be clearly enunciated, but the squad soon executes the appropriate response regardless of many specifications of the command, partly because other aspects of the situation begin to control the behavior. The form of the response then characteristically degenerates, and may eventually reach the stage of a mere forceful expulsion of air with some voicing but little or no shaping. It is only because the appropriate behavior of the squad survives the deterioration in the behavior of the sergeant that the final form is effective. The squad, as a group of listeners, has been progressively reconditioned. A new squad, however, may bring back the more specific form of response in the behavior of the ser­ geant.

Reinforcing consequences continue to be important after verbal behavior has been acquired. Their principal function is then to maintain the response in strength. How often the speaker will emit a response dep_ends, other ~hings being equal, upon the over-all fre­ quency of remforcement in a given verbal community. If reinforce­ ments cease altogether through some change of circumstance, an operant grows. weak and may effectively disappear in "extinction."

Ope~a~t reinforcement, then, is simply a way of controlling the p~obab1hty of occurrence of a certain class of verbal responses. If we wish to make a response of given form highl b bl

. . y pro a e, we arrange f h or t e effective reinforcement of many insta If . . · · fr nces. we wish to ehm- mate It om a verbal repertoire we arrange th . f

. ' at rem orcement shall l f no onger ollow. Any information rega d' h . · f r mg t e relative frequency o f rem orcement characteristic of a . b

. given ver al community is obvi-1 1 e m predicting such b h . ous y va ua bl e av1or.

GENERAL PROBLEMS ~· STIMULUS CONTROL

A child acquires verbal behavior when relatively unpattemed vocalizations, selectively reinforced, gradually assume forms which produce appropriate consequences in a given verbal community. In formulating this process we do not need to mention stimuli occurring prior to the behavior to be reinforced. It is difficult, if not impossible, to discover stimuli which evoke specific vocal responses in the young child. There is no stimulus which makes a child say b or ii ore, as one may make him salivate by placing a lemon drop in his mouth or make his pupils contract by shining a light into his eyes. The raw responses from which verbal behavior is constructed are not "elicited." In order to reinforce a given response we simply wait until it occurs.

Prior stimuli are, however, important in the control of verbal be­ havior. They are important because they enter into a three-term con­ tingency of reinforcement which may be stated in this way: in the presence of a given stimulus, a given response is characteristically followed by a given reinforcement. Such a contingency is a property of the environment. When it prevails, the organism not only acquires the response which achieves reinforcement, it becomes more likely to emit that response in the presence of the prior stimulus. The process through which this comes about, called "stimulus discrimination," has been extensively studied in nonverbal behavior. Numerous ex­ amples will be described in later chapters.

MOTIVATION AND EMOTION

Although reinforcement provides for the control of .a response, we do not use reinforcement as such when we later exercise control. By reinforcing with candy we strengthen the response Candy! but the response will be emitted only when the child is, as we say, hungry ~or candy. Subsequently we control the response, not ~y further rein­ forcement, but by depriving or satiating the child with candy. No~­ verbal responses are controlled in the same way. Whether a door is opened with a "twist-and-push" or with an ?ut~, we ma~e the :e· sponse more or less likely by altering the depnvauon associated with the reinforcement of getting through the door. If the r~sponse has been reinforced in several different ways, we may control it by cha~g­ ing, not the deprivation, but the impending reinforcement. "W_e in­ crease the probability that a man will cr~ss a room by placmg a currently reinforcing object on the other side. By removmg such an

33 VERBAL BEHAVIOR

object or, better still, placing it near the man, we reduce the prob­ ability of his crossing the room.

When an operant is acquired it becomes a membe~ of_ a group of responses which vary together with the relevant depnvauon. A man gets a drink of water in many ways-by reaching for a glass of water, by opening a faucet, by pouring water from a pitcher, and so on. The verbal operant Water.' becomes a member of this group when it is reinforced with water. The probabilities of all operants so reinforced vary together. Responses in all classes are made more likely to occur when we deprive the man of water or cause him to lose water-for example, by inducing violent exercise, by feeding him salt which must be excreted, or by raising the temperature of his surroundings so that he sweats. On the other hand, we make all such responses less likely to occur by causing the man to drink large amounts of water.

Such operations are said by the layman to create or allay a "state of thirst." Such a concept is only as valid or useful in prediction and control as the observations upon which it rests. The important events are the operations which are said to change the state of thirst. In predicting and controlling the verbal response Water! we do not change thirst directly; we engage in certain operations which are said to change it. It is simpler to omit any reference to a " drive" and say that the probability of the response Water! can be changed through these operations.

Suppose, however, tha~ in ~ddition to drinking water our speaker has also used water to extmgu1sh fires. Until we have tested the point, we cann~t be sure that a response acquired when he has been rein­ forced with water while thirsty will be emitted when the wastebasket catch_es fire. If there is any functional connection, it must be found in certam events common to d · k · · ·

rm mg water and extmgu1shing a fire. If the response Water' has bee · f d . . . . · n rem orce wtth the visual stimula-

tio~ supplied by w~ter prior to water in the mouth, and if this stimu­ lation plays a role m co~trolling the behavior of extinguishin a fire then the response acqmred l d g ' · th f on Yun er water deprivation may occur m e case o a conflagration Th the strength of w t 1 • • e group of operations which affect a er. suggests m c "need for water" th h ' ommon parlance, some general

ra er t an "th· " B amine all behavior i·n h" h irst. ut we should have to ex-

w 1c water plays . . define this need w an essential role m order to

· e may say that w · response which has been . f ~ increase the strength of any

rem orced with w . . response Water' by stre th . ater, me 1 udmg the verbal

·, ng ening any b h · . . e av1or which "requires

GENERAL PROBLEMS

water for its execution." (In more technical terms, the latter would be described as any behavior under the control of water as a dis­ criminative stimulus.)

AVERSIVE CONTROL

There are other types of consequences which alter the strength of a verbal response. Behavior may be reinforced by the reduction of aversive stimulation. When an aversive stimulus itself is reduced, we call the behavior escape. When some condition which characteristi­ cally precedes an aversive stimulus is reduced, we speak of avoidance. Thus, if the verbal response Stop it! is reinforced when it brings about the cessation of physical injury, the response is an example of escape. But Don't touch me! may be reinforced when it brings about the cessation of the threat of such injury-of events which have pre­ viously been followed by such injury and which are therefore con­ ditioned aversive stimuli-and the behavior is then called avoidance. When a speaker has had a history of such reinforcement, we control his verbal behavior by creating appropriate circumstances. We make him say Stop it! by pummeling him, or Don't touch me! by threaten­ ing to do so.

A complete account of the verbal behavior of the individ_ual speaker would lead us to survey other variables in the fields of motiva­ tion and emotion, but the processes here are seldom, if ever, uniquely related to verbal behavior. Some relevant points are discussed in Chapter 8.

THE LISTENER AND THE TOTAL VERBAL EPISODE

Our definition of verbal behavior applies only to the speaker, but the listener cannot be omitted from our account. The traditional conception of verbal behavior discussed in Chapter 1 has generally implied that certain basic linguistic processes were common to both speaker and listener. Common processes are suggested wh~n langu~ge is said to arouse in the mind of the listener "ideas present m the mmd of the speaker," or when communication is regarded as successful only if an expression has "the same meaning fo_r both speaker and listener." Theories of meaning are usually apphed to both speaker and listener as if the meaning process were the same for both.

Much of the behavior of the listener has no resemblance to the

34 VERBAL BEHAVIOR

behavior of the speaker and is not verbal accordi~g to our defini~ion.: But the listener (and the reader as well) is reacting to verbal sllmuh -the end-products of the behavior here analyzed-and we are natu­ rally interested in the fate of such stimuli. On the one hand they evoke responses of glands and smooth muscles, mediated by the auto­ nomic nervous system, especially emotional reactions. These ex­ emplify classical conditioned reflexes. On the other hand verbal stimuli control much of the complex skeletal behavior with which the individual operates upon his environment. The relevant proc­ esses in both these broad areas will be taken up as needed in what follows. In neither case do the verbal stimuli differ in any particular from other kinds of stimulation. The behavior of a man as listener is not to be distinguished from other forms of his behavior.

Our interest in the listener is not, however, merely an interest in what happens to the verbal stimuli created by the speaker. In a com­ plete account of a verbal episode we need to show that the behavior of the listener does in fact provide the conditions we have assumed in explaining the behavior of the speaker. We need separate but in­ terlocking accounts of the behaviors of both speaker and listener if our expla~ation of verbal behavior is to be complete. In explaining the behav10r of the speaker we assume a listener who will reinforce his behavior in certain ways. In accounting for the behavior of the listener we assume a speaker whose behavior bears a certain relation to environmental conditions. The interchanges between them must explain all the conditions thus assumed. The account of the whole episode is then complete.

1 We shall see later that in many imporlant instances the r t · l '-·h · at the same time as a speaker. 1s ener u a so "" av1ng