Analysis of Verbal Behavior

In topography-based verbal behavior, different antecedent stimuli control different topographies of responding, whereas in selection-based verbal behavior, different antecedent stimuli control the selection of visually distinct stimuli from an array of options. In this article, we point out three variable characteristics of selection-based behavior, highlighted by recent technological developments, that affect its similarity to topography-based behavior: The extent to which stimuli can be constructed from minimal units, the size and composition of the selection array, and the similarity of response-produced stimuli to verbal stimuli that are prevalent in the speaker's verbal community...

Behavior analysts are concerned with developing strong client-therapist relationships. One challenge to the development of such relationships may be a reliance on technical language that stakeholders find unpleasant. Previous research suggests that some behavior analysis terms evoke negative emotional responses. However, most relevant research was conducted with individuals from the general public and not individuals with a history of interaction with behavior analysts. The current study evaluated how parents of individuals with disabilities, who accessed behavior analytic services for their child, rated their emotional responses to 40 behavior analysis terms...

The purpose of this study was to assess whether variations in visual stimulus presentation during tact training would affect efficacy, efficiency, and the emergence of listener responses. Participants included two preschool-aged children diagnosed with autism. We implemented two teaching conditions using an adapted alternating treatment design with intrasubject replications. During successive tact training, the experimenter presented one picture per trial. During simultaneous training, the experimenter pointed to the target picture in a stimulus array...

The inclusion of private events in the philosophy of our science is integral to avoid dualism and remain objective rather than making assumptions about an unseen mind. However, the inclusion of behaviors and stimuli which cannot be observed in an analysis poses obvious issues. One established method of studying covert behavior is to examine tasks that are presumed to require verbal mediation, and observing how a participant's performance is affected when they are required to speak out loud during the task (often called "blocking"), again presuming this will make it difficult or impossible to simultaneously talk to yourself covertly...

The use of autoclitics can influence the behavior of individuals making choices when responding to a survey (e.g., checking or unchecking a box). In two studies, we investigated the effects of autoclitics as "nudges" on choice by manipulating different frames (opt-in and opt-out) and default options (i.e., unchecked and checked boxes). Undergraduate students recruited from behavioral science courses engaged with materials in the study. In study 1, we used an online survey at the beginning of the semester offering the choice of whether to enroll in extra-academic activities (i...

UNLABELLED: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may struggle with verbal behavior related to recall in various contexts. However, relatively little research has evaluated methods for improving recall among this population, and even fewer from a verbal behavior perspective. One socially important set of skills that relies upon a behavioral repertoire of recall is applied reading skills, such as reading comprehension and story recall. Valentino et al. (2015) designed an intervention package to teach children with ASD to recall short stories and conceptualized the behavior as an intraverbal chain...

UNLABELLED: Published research in scientific journals are critical resources for researchers as primary sources about: what is important in the field, the direction the field is headed, how the field relates to other sciences, and as a historical record for each of these. In this exploratory study, we analyzed the articles of five behavior analytic journals to identify trends in these areas. To do this, we downloaded all available articles ( N = 10,405) since the inception of five behavior analytic journals and one control journal...

UNLABELLED: Music is a unique form of verbal stimuli (Reynolds & Hayes,  The Psychological Record , 67 (3), 413-421, 2017) and the literature has indicated some success in using procedures involving the frame of coordination or stimulus equivalence to teach early piano skills to learners with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD; Hill et al.,  Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis , 53 (1), 188-208, 2020). However, these studies only targeted narrow skills rather than a complete repertoire...

Although many neurotypical children acquire untaught word-object relations incidentally from naturally occurring environmental experiences, many children with and without developmental disabilities require specific intervention. This study examined the effects of rotating listener (match and point) and speaker (tact and intraverbal-tact) responses with added echoics during multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) with training sets of stimuli on the acquisition of Incidental Bidirectional Naming (Inc-BiN). Listener-speaker MEI procedures reported in Hawkins et al...

In simultaneous prompting procedures, an immediate (i.e., 0-s) prompt is presented during all training trials, and transfer to the target discriminative condition is assessed during daily probes. Previous research suggests that simultaneous prompting procedures are efficacious and may produce acquisition in fewer errors to mastery when compared to prompt delay procedures. To date, only a single study on simultaneous prompting has included intraverbal targets. The current study evaluated the efficacy of a simultaneous prompting procedure on the acquisition of intraverbal synonyms for six children at risk for reading failure...

UNLABELLED: The autoclitic is among the least studied and most complex verbal operant named and described by Skinner. The descriptive autoclitic is one subtype, which among other functions can describe the strength of the response. If the clarity of the stimulus is one source of response strength for tacts, manipulating stimulus clarity should evoke different frequencies of descriptive autoclitics. In an experiment with adults, digitally distorting pictures of common objects predicted the relative frequency of descriptive autoclitics that accompanied tacts...

The discipline of film studies often engages in analyses of the functions of filmmakers' decisions in terms of their effects on viewers. Behavior analysis uses a similar, functional-analytic approach toward understanding the relationship between individuals' behavior and the environmental effects that maintain their behavior. Given converging similarities between the two disciplines, a functional analysis of filmmaking is provided, using Skinner (1957)'s Verbal Behavior as a guiding framework. Similar to behavioral conceptualizations of language and speaker-listener verbal episodes, the analysis prioritizes functional explanation of the controlling variables and conditions that underlie the meaning of filmmakers' behavior and behavioral products, rather than solely focusing on their topographical description...

An intraverbal assessment was administered to older adults with aphasia, using a hierarchy of questions that required increasingly complex verbal discriminative stimulus control. Five categories of errors were defined and analyzed for putative stimulus control, with the aim to identify requisite assessment components leading to more efficient and effective treatments. Evocative control over intraverbal error responses was evident throughout the database, as shown by commonalities within four distinct categories of errors; a fifth category, representing a narrow majority of errors, was less clear in terms of functional control over responses...

Language delays are commonly displayed by children on the autism spectrum. To help facilitate the development of verbal behavior, practitioners often implement intensive one-on-one, face-to-face instruction. However, the COVID-19 pandemic hindered typical face-to-face service delivery and caused practitioners to assess alternative approaches to facilitate clients' continued progress. Instructive feedback (IF) is one teaching strategy to enhance instruction or make it more efficient. During this teaching procedure, instructors provide formal teaching of target responses and embed demonstrations of secondary target responses within sequences of instruction...

UNLABELLED: The presentation of non-target stimuli during trial-based instruction is known as instructive feedback. Previous research on instructive feedback has shown that learners with developmental disabilities may acquire these additional (i.e., secondary) targets without further training. Embedding secondary targets during the review of previously mastered targets may be used to bolster instructional gains. The current study evaluated the efficacy of embedding secondary targets during maintenance sessions for a child with autism spectrum disorder...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Problem-solving strategies, such as visual imagining and self-questioning, may assist children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in recalling past events. In the current study, at the start of each session, a 7-year-old boy with ASD engaged in a novel activity with a behavior therapist who took pictures of the activity. Ninety minutes later, a different therapist asked the participant to describe the prior activity. The intervention consisted of showing the participant pictures of the activity, telling him to close his eyes and imagine the activity, modeling asking and answering seven questions (e...

We evaluated audience control over children's honest reports using a reversal (ABA or ABAB) design. Four typically developing children performed a computer game in which they had to shoot a target and then report on their performance during and at the end of each session. Baseline assessed the accuracy of their reports in the absence of an experimenter. During the audience condition, an adult was present in the room and observed the child during the task. Participants accurately reported their errors when an adult was present, whereas they lied about their performance by systematically reporting errors as correct responses when an adult was absent...

UNLABELLED: This systematic review evaluated the effects of foreign tact training on emergent learning outcomes in ten published studies. We also conducted a meta-analysis of aggregate data from seven studies comparing outcomes of foreign tact training with other verbal operant procedures. The preliminary findings indicated foreign tact training produced criterion-level responses in 84 of 106 (79.2%) post-test probes across 37 learners and 55 evaluations of foreign tact training. The meta-analysis results revealed significantly higher within-subjects mean levels of emergent responding following foreign tact training than foreign-to-native intraverbal, native-to-foreign intraverbal, and foreign listener training...

Control by compound antecedent stimuli in verbal behavior represents an understudied but promising area of research. To date, reference to compound verbal stimulus control has generally only included descriptions of convergent multiple control. A sizeable experimental literature exists on the topic of compound stimulus control, which differs from convergent multiple control in that the stimulus elements often do not have a prior conditioning history (i.e., do not separately strengthen any response). The current study attempted to bridge the experimental and verbal behavior literatures by including a two-component antecedent verbal stimulus during intraverbal training for which neither component currently served an evocative function...