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58 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back
Formal Properties of Language
The formal properties of language involve the topography (i.e. form, structure) of the verbal response.
Functional Properties of Language
The functional properties of language involve the causes of the response.
Formal Descriptions of Language
-phonemes, morphemes, lexicon, syntax, grammar, semantics
-classifying words as nouns, verbs, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, and articles
Theories of Language
Theories of language can be classified into three categories: biological, cognitive, and environmental.
Biological Theory
The basic orientation of the biological theory is that language is a function of physiological processes and functions.
Cognitive Theory
Proponents of the cognitive approach to language propose that language is controlled by internal processing systems that accept, classify, code, encode, and store verbal information.
Environmental Theory
Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned behavior, and that it is acquired, extended, and maintained by the same types of environmental variables, and principles that control nonlanguage behavior (i.e. stimulus control, motivating operations, reinforcement, extinction).
Verbal Behavior
Behavior that is reinforced through the mediation of another person’s behavior.
Verbal behavior involves social interaction between speakers and listeners, whereby speakers gain access to reinforcement and control their environment though the behavior of listeners.
Verbal behavior includes vocal-verbal behavior and nonvocal-verbal behavior.
Skinner’s Verbal Behavior
Skinner’s verbal behavior is primarily concerned with the behavior of the speaker.
Listener
The listener must learn how to reinforce the speakers' verbal behavior, meaning that listeners are taught to respond to words, and interact with speakers.
Vocal Behavior
In the field of Pathology verbal behavior has become synonymous with vocal behavior. In Psychology the term nonverbal communication was contrasted with the term verbal behavior, implying that verbal behavior was vocal communication and nonverbal behavior was non-vocal communication.
Unit of Analysis
The unit of analysis of verbal behavior is the functional relation between a type of responding and the same independent variables that control nonverbal behavior, namely
(a) motivating variables
(b
discriminative stimuli
(c) consequences
Skinner (1957) referred to this unit as a verbal operant.
Elementary Verbal Operants
Skinner (1957) identified six different types of elementary verbal operants
-Mand
-Tact
-Echoic
-Intraverbal
-Textual
-Transcription
Mand Operant
The mand is a type of verbal operant in which a speaker asks for (or states, demand, implies, etc.) what he needs or wants.
The mand is a verbal operant for which the form of the response is under the functional control of motivating operations (MO’s) and specific reinforcement.
Mands are the first verbal operant acquired by a human child.
Skinner pointed out that the mand is the only type of verbal behavior that directly benefits the speaker, meaning that the mand gets the speaker reinforcers such as edibles, toys, attention, or the removal of aversive stimuli.
Mands often become strong forms of verbal behavior because of specific reinforcement, and this reinforcement often satisfies an immediate deprivation condition or removes some aversive stimulus.
Tact Operant
The tact is a type of verbal operant in which a speaker names things and actions that the speaker has direct contact with through any of the sense modes.
The tact is a verbal operant under the functional control of nonverbal discriminative stimulus, and it produces generalized conditioned reinforcement.
Echoic Operant
The echoic is a type of verbal operant that occurs when a speaker repeats the verbal behavior of another speaker.
The echoic operant is controlled by a verbal discriminative stimulus that has point-to-point correspondence and formal similarity with the response.
Formal Similarity
Formal similarity occurs when the controlling antecedent stimulus and the response or response produce (a) share the same sense mode (e.g. both stimulus and response are visual, auditory, or tactile) and (b) physically resemble each other. The ability to echo the phonemes and words of others is essential for learning to identify objects and actions.
Copying a Text
Skinner also presented copying a text as a type of verbal behavior in which a written verbal stimulus has point-to-point correspondence and formal similarity with a written verbal response.
Intraverbal Operant
The intraverbal is a type of verbal operant in which a speaker differentially responds to the verbal behavior of others. The intraverbal operant occurs when a verbal discriminative stimulus evokes a verbal response that does not have point-to-point correspondence with the verbal stimulus. The interverbal operant produces generalized conditioned reinforcement.
Verbal Operant Repertoires
A mand repertoire allows a speaker to ask questions.
A tact repertoire permits verbal behavior about an object or event that is actually present.
An intraverbal repertoire allows a speaker to answer questions and to talk about (and think about) objects and events that are not physically present.
Textual Operant
Textual behavior is reading, without any implications that the reader understand what is being read. The textual operant has point-to-point correspondence but not formal similarity, between the stimulus and the response product.
Transcription Operant
Transcription is a type of verbal behavior in which a spoken verbal stimulus controls a written, typed, or finger-spelled response.
Audience
An audience is a discriminative stimulus in the presence of which verbal behavior is characteristically reinforced and in the presence of which, therefore, it is characteristically strong.
Understanding
Verbal stimulus control may also evoke a listener’s nonverbal behavior. Skinner (1957) identified this type of listener behavior as understanding.
Identifying Verbal Operants
1. Does an MO control the response form? If yes, then the operant is at least part mand.
2. Does an S-D control the response form? If yes, then:
3. Is the S-D nonverbal? If yes, then the operant is at least part tact.
4. Is the S-D verbal? If yes, then:
5. Is there point-to-point correspondence between the verbal S-D and the response? If not, then the operant is at least part intraverbal. If there is point-to-point correspondence, then:
6. Is there formal similarity between the verbal S-D and the response. If yes, then the operant must be echoic, imitative, or copying a text. If not, then the operant must be textural or transcription.
Automatic Reinforcement
Some behavior is strengthened or weakened, not be external consequences, but by its response products which have reinforcing or punishing effects.
Skinner used the terms automatic reinforcement and automatic punishment.
Verbal behavior can produce automatic reinforcement, and it has a significant role in the acquisition and maintenance of verbal behavior.
2 Stage Conditioning History
1. A neutral verbal stimulus is paired with an existing form of conditioned or unconditioned reinforcement.
2. A vocal response as either random muscle movement of the vocal cords or reflexive behavior produces an auditory response that on occasion may sound somewhat like someone’s words, intonations, and vocal pitches.
Generic Tact Extension
The novel stimulus shares all of the relevant or defining features of the original stimulus.
Metaphorical Tact Extension
The novel stimulus shares some but not all of the relevant features associated with the original stimulus.
Metonymical Tact Extension
Verbal responses to novel stimuli that share none of the relevant features of the original stimulus configuration, but some irrelevant but related feature has acquired stimulus control.
Solistic Tact Extension
Occurs when a stimulus property that is only indirectly related to the tact relation evokes substandard verbal behavior such as malaprops
Analyzing Complex Verbal Behavior
The analysis of private stimulation and how it acquires stimulus control is complex because of two problems:
(a) The participant can directly observe the private stimuli, but the applied behavior analyst cannot.
(b) private stimulus control of verbal episodes in the natural environment will likely remain private.
Private Events
What is commonly referred to as “thinking” involves overt stimulus control and private events (e.g., covert stimulus control).
Public Accompaniment
Public accompaniment occurs when an observable stimulus accompanies a private stimulus.
Collateral Responses
Caregivers also teach young persons to tact their private stimuli by using collateral responses (i.e., observable behavior) that reliably occur with private stimuli.
Common Properties
Common properties also involve public stimuli, but in a different way. A speaker may learn to tact temporal, geometrical, or descriptive properties of objects and then generalize those tact relations to private stimuli.
Response Reduction
Most speakers learn to tact features of their own bodies such as movements and positions. The kinesthetic stimuli arising from the movement and positions can acquire control over the verbal responses. Then movements shrink in size (become covert), the kinesthetic stimuli may remain sufficiently similar to those resulting from the overt movement that the learner’s tact occurs as an instance of stimulus generalization.
Convergent Multiple Control
Identifies when the occurrence of a single verbal response is a function of more than one variable.
Divergent Multiple Control
Multiple control also occurs when a single antecedent variable affects the strength of many responses.
Thematic Verbal Operants
Thematic verbal operants are mands, tacts, and intraverbals and involve different response topographies controlled by a common variable.
Formal Verbal Operants
Formal verbal operants are echoic (imitation, copying a text), and textual (and transcription,) and are controlled by a common variable, with point-to-point correspondence.
Multiple Audiences
Different audiences may evoke different response forms. A positive audience has special effects, especially a large positive audience (e.g. as in a rally for a certain cause) as does a negative audience.
Elaborating Multiple Control
Multiple sources of control can be any combination of thematic or formal sources, even multiple sources from within a single verbal operant, such as multiple tacts or multiple intraverbals.
Autoclitic Relation
Autoclitic relations identify when a speaker’s own verbal behavior functions as an S-D or an MO for additional speaker verbal behavior. Verbal behavior about a speaker’s own verbal behavior.
Primary (Level 1) Verbal Operants
MO’s and /or S-D’s are present and affect the primary verbal operant. The speaker has to something to say.
Secondary (Level 2) Verbal Operants
The speaker observes the primary controlling variables of her own verbal behavior and her disposition to emit the primary verbal behavior.
Autoclitic Tact Relations
Informs the listener of the type of primary verbal operant the autoclitic accompanies.
Autoclitic tact relations informs the listener of some nonverbal aspect of the primary verbal operant and is therefore controlled by nonverbal stimuli.
Autoclitic Mand Relations
Speaker’s use autoclitic mands frequently to help the listener present effective reinforcers.
A specific MO controls the autoclitic mand, and its role is to mand the listener to react in some specific way to the primary verbal operant.
Developing Autoclitic Relations
Speakers develop autoclitic relations in several ways.

Skinner (1957) points out, “An auoclitic affects the listener by indicating either a property of the speaker’s behavior or the circumstances responsible for that property” (p. 329).
“In the absence of any other verbal behavior whatsoever autoclitics cannot occur. It is only when [the elementary] verbal operants have been established in strength that the speaker finds himself subject to the additional contingencies which establish autoclitic behavior” (p.330).
Language Assessment
Although information rendered from language assessments are helpful in may ways, the tests do not distinguish among the mand, tact, and intraverbal repertoires, and important language deficits cannot be identified.
The behavior analyst should examine the current effectiveness of each verbal operant:
- Obtain information about the child’s mand repertoire.
- What behavior does the child engage in to obtain the reinforcement?
- When the reinforcement is provided, does the mand behavior cease?
- What is the frequency and complexity of the various mand units?
Language Intervention
Skinner’s analysis suggests that a complete verbal repertoire is composed of each of the different elementary operants, and separate speaker and listener repertoires.
Individual verbal operants are then seen as the bases for building more advanced language behavior.
Mand Training
Mands allow the subject to control the delivery of reinforcers when those reinforcers are most valuable.
If mands fail to develop in a typical manner, negative behavior such as tantrums, aggression, social withdrawal, or self-injury that serve the mand function commonly emerge.
During mand training, responses needs to be under the functional control of the relevant MO.
The easiest mands to teach in an early language intervention program are usually mands for items for which the MO is frequently strong for the child and satiation is slow to occur (e.g., food, toys, videos).
Mand training should be a significant part of any intervention program designed for children with autism or other severe language delays.
Echoic Training
For an early language learner the ability to repeat words when asked to do so plays a major role in the development of other verbal operants.
Many children with autism and other language delays are unable to emit echoic behavior, special training procedures are required to develop the echoic repertoire.
Goals of Echoic Training
1. Teach the child to repeat the words and phrases emitted by parents and teachers when asked to do so.
2. Establish a generalized repertoire the child can repeat novel words and combinations.
3. Transfer the response form to other verbal operants.
Initial Echoic Stimulus Control
The most common is direct echoic training in which vocal stimulus is presented and successive approximations to the target response are differentially reinforced.
Involves a combination of prompting, fading, shaping, extinction, and reinforcement techniques.
Placing an echoic trial within a mand frame.
The MO is a powerful independent variable in language training and can be temporally used to establish other verbal operants.
Increasing any vocal behavior may facilitate the ultimate establishment of echoic control.
Directly reinforce all vocal behaviors.
Automatic reinforcement procedures can be used by pairing a neutral stimulus with an established form of reinforcement, the neutral stimulus can become a conditioned reinforcer.
Tact Training
A child must learn to tact objects, actions, properties of objects and actions, prepositional relations, abstractions, private events, and so on.
The goal is to bring a verbal response under nonverbal stimulus control.
A mand frame can be used to establish tacting.
Teaching tacts of actions requires that the nonverbal stimulus of movement be present and a response such as “jump” be brought under the control of the action of jumping.
Teaching tacts involving prepositions, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, and so on, also involves the establishment of nonverbal stimulus control.
Intraverbal Training
Many children with autism, developmental disabilities, or other language delays suffer from defective or nonexistent intraverbal repertoires, even though some can emit hundreds of mands, tacts, and receptive responses.
In general, verbal stimulus control over verbal responding is more difficult to establish than nonverbal control.
Formal training on intraverbal behavior for a language delayed child should not occur until the child has well established mand, tact, echoic, imitation, receptive, and matching-to-sample repertoires.
Components of a Verbal Behavior Program
-receptive language training
-matching-to-sample
-mixing and varying trails
-multiple response training
-sentence construction
-conversation skills
-peer interaction
-reading
-writing