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Verbal Behavior is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he describes what he calls verbal behavior, or what was traditionally called linguistics. [1] [2] Skinner's work describes the controlling elements of verbal behavior with terminology invented for the analysis - echoics, mands, tacts, autoclitics and others - as well as carefully defined uses of ordinary terms such as audience.
A mand is sometimes said to "specify its reinforcement" although this is not always the case. Skinner introduced the mand as one of six primary verbal operants in his 1957 work, Verbal Behavior. Chapter three of Skinner's work, Verbal Behavior, discusses a functional relationship called the mand. A mand is a form of verbal behavior that is ...
An autoclitic is a verbal behavior that modifies the functions of other verbal behaviors. For example, "I think it is raining" possesses the autoclitic "I think," which moderates the strength of the statement "it is raining." Research that involves autoclitics includes Lodhi & Greer (1989). [2]
Some people, more than others, tend to engage in indirect or behavioral communication, whether consciously or unconsciously, despite the different alternatives to verbal communication. [1] An individual's behavioral style significantly affects verbal and nonverbal communication. [3] Someone rarely utilizes all behavioral communication styles.
Although Noam Chomsky was highly critical of Verbal Behavior, he conceded that Skinner's "S-R psychology" was worth a review. [36] Behavior analysts reject Chomsky's appraisal of Skinner's work as merely "stimulus-response psychology," and some have argued that this mischaracterization highlights a poor understanding of Skinner's work and the ...
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. [1] [2] It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and ...
Less technically, a tact is a label. For example, a child may see their pet dog and say "dog"; the nonverbal stimulus (dog) evoked the response "dog" which is maintained by praise (or generalized conditioned reinforcement) "you're right, that is a dog!" Chapter five of Skinner's Verbal Behavior discusses the tact in depth.
He identified echoic behavior as one of his basic verbal operants, postulating that verbal behavior was learned by an infant from a verbal community. Skinner's account takes verbal behavior beyond an intra-individual process to an inter-individual process. He defined verbal behavior as "behavior reinforced through the mediation of others". [60]