verbal function: intraverbals and verbal learning thematic intraverbal classes intraverbal chains

Verbal Function: Intraverbals and Verbal Learning

Thematic Intraverbal ClassesIntraverbal ChainsIntraverbal ChunksVerbal Learning

Addendum 21A: Serial LearningAddendum 21B: Paired‑Associates LearningAddendum 21C: Free RecallAddendum 21D: Verbal Discrimination and Verbal Recognition

• I. Verbal responses occasioned by verbal stimuli, where the relation between stimulus and response is an arbitrary one established by the verbal community. Intraverbal behavior is chaining as it occurs in verbal behavior. Either the speaker or someone else may provide verbal stimuli

• II. Strengthening of verbal behavior by virtue of common class membership, where class membership is derived from verbal histories and thematic relations, as when tepee is strengthened in the context of other Native American words, such as wigwam and papoose

Intraverbal Behavior

Not usually poems or scripts or other recitations, which include many thematic elements

Consider some arbitrary sequences:

Reciting the alphabet

•There is little logic to the order of the letters (e.g., voiced-voiceless pairs appear in either order: d - t or b - p but f - v or s - z)

Counting

•The number names are arbitrary, and only when correspondences are created do numbers begin to become functional (e.g., pointing to objects as one counts them)

Intraverbal Behavior:Ideal Intraverbals?

• Chains versus Chunks

• Some kinds of sequences involve environmental stimuli and are necessarily chained (you can’t get into the elevator until the door has opened)

• Others go so quickly that there is no time for one response to produce the stimulus for the next (in typing, you don’t wait to see one letter before you type the next one)

• Verbal Chains and Chunks

• Some kinds of sequences involve environmental stimuli and are necessarily chained (as when an actor needs a cue for the next line in a play)

• Others go so quickly that there is no time for one response to produce the stimulus for the next (as when an actor fluently and rapidly recites a very well-learned passage)



Addendum 21A: Serial LearningAddendum 21B: Paired‑Associates LearningAddendum 21C: Free RecallAddendum 21D: Verbal Discrimination and Verbal Recognition

Intraverbal Learning Procedures

• Serial Learning

• Paired-Associates Learning

• Free Recall

• Verbal Discrimination

- Verbal Recognition (a special case)

The Contact of Verbal Behavior With the Environment

AbstractionThe Extension of Verbal Classes

MetaphorThe Language of Private EventsVerbal Classes and NamingVerbal Behavior Conditional Upon Verbal Behavior

Descriptive Autoclitics: Discriminating Our Own Verbal Behavior

The ConTACT of Verbal Behavior With the Environment




It was an important step forward in the analysis of vision when the ancients recognized that vision depended not on emanations from the eye that made contact with seen objects, but rather on the entry into the eye of light produced by or reflected from objects

The language of reference raises a similar issue of direction: its implied direction is from the speaker to the referenced object

The language of tacting implies the opposite direction, though it remains too easy to say that we tact objects rather than that objects occasion our tacts

The Direction of Effect in Tacting

•A reinforcing community with no access to private stimuli may generate verbal behavior with respect to them by basing consequences on

(1) common public accompaniments

(2) collateral responses to the private stimuli

(3) responses related to public stimuli but transferred to private events by virtue of common properties, as in metaphorical or metonymical extension

(4) responses eventually made to private stimuli that are similar except in magnitude to private stimuli otherwise accompanied by public manifestations

Skinner’s four ways by which a public verbal community can create

a vocabulary of private events

Two examples:

Geometric solids for a sighted person and for a blind person

A toothache for a patient and for a dentist

Different Modes of Access to a Single Stimulus

It is important to remember that this is not about showing or telling, though both may enter into the learning of names. Rather, it is about the consequences the verbal community brings to bear on the verbal behavior of those members who are acquiring a vocabulary of private events

Consider the development of the vocabularies of “I remember,” “I forgot,” and “I never knew.” Developmental psychologies look at the order in and the ages at which these are learned in natural environments, but it might be more profitable to examine how they might be taught

Caregivers often know what children have or have not had experience with, so it is actually fairly straightforward to arrange appropriate contingencies

How the public verbal community creates vocabularies of private events

Tact: a verbal discriminative response (as when the verbal response apple in the presence of an apple is said to tact the apple). The tact captures stimulus control as it enters into verbal behavior. The tact relation includes only responding in the presence of or shortly after the tacted stimulus and therefore is not equivalent to naming or reference

Naming: a higher-order class that involves arbitrary stimulus classes (things or events with particular names) and corresponding arbitrary verbal topographies (the words that serve as their names) in a bi-directional relationship. Naming requires tacting, echoic behavior and listener behavior

The Tact and Naming

The Tact and Naming

• Naming: a higher-order class that involves arbitrary stimulus classes (things or events with particular names) and corresponding arbitrary verbal topographies (the words that serve as their names) in a bi-directional relationship. Naming requires tacting, echoic behavior and listener behavior

Other Aspects of Tacting and Naming

• Extensions of the Tact

• Metaphor

• Private Events

Autoclitic Processes

• A unit of verbal behavior that depends on other verbal behavior for its occurrence and that modifies the effects of that other verbal behavior on the listener. Relational autoclitics involve verbal units coordinated with other units in such a way that they cannot stand alone, as when grammatical tenses depend on temporal features of events. Descriptive autoclitics involve discriminations of one's own behavior, as when the word “not” depends on a mismatch between what one is inclined to say and the appropriateness of saying it

Some VB quotations on autoclitics

• (p. 317) Negative autoclitics qualify or cancel the response which they accompany but imply that the response is strong for some reason

• Consider the Wayne’s World “Not!”

• (p. 332) The manipulation of verbal behavior, particularly the grouping and ordering of responses, is also autoclitic

• Consider grammatical structure and the distinction between descriptive and relational autoclitics

• (p. 332) Responses cannot be grouped or ordered until they have occurred or are about to occur

• How is what we know about verbal classes relevant to the novelty of verbal behavior?

Adduction

• Sometimes the separate variables that are the multiple causes of a given response come together in a novel combination to produce novel behavior, as when two or more newly learned words appear together for the first time in a sentence a child has never uttered before. The phenomenon is called adduction

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• Seeing a horse of another color

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Variations on Adduction:Sources of Novel Behavior

• Through higher-order classes, as in Baer et al.‘s generalized imitation and Horne and Lowe’s naming

• Through equivalence classes, as in Sidman, and their derivatives, as in Hayes’s relational frames

• Through discriminations based on common antecedent stimuli, as in Lowenkron’s joint control

• Through reinforcing effects based on similarities between one’s own behavior and the behavior of others, as in Palmer’s parity

They are defined by function and not by form

Few instances of verbal behavior have only a single function, so it is not often profitable to analyze a complex utterance by saying some parts of it are members of one verbal class and other are members of another class

Linguists and grammarians do so when they distinguish among nouns and verbs and so on, but it is only rarely that we can say that this word in a sentence is a tact and this other one is a mand and this third one is an intraverbal

The Units of Verbal Behavior

These are not theories.

These are properties of verbal behavior.

verbal function: intraverbals and verbal learning thematic intraverbal classes intraverbal chains

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