Approximately 5% of older adults have a dementia diagnosis, and language deterioration is commonly associated with this disorder (Kempler, 2005). Several instruments have been developed to diagnose dementia and assess language capabilities of elderly adults. However, none of these instruments take a functional approach to language assessment as…

Mand training is often a primary focus in early language instruction and typically includes mands that are positively reinforced. However, mands maintained by negative reinforcement are also important skills to teach. These include mands to escape aversive demands or unwanted items. Another type of negatively reinforced mand important to teach…

Skinner discussed the topic of motivation in every chapter of the book "Verbal Behavior" (1957), usually with his preferred terminology of ''deprivation, satiation, and aversive stimulation.'' In the current paper, direct quotations are used to systematically take the reader through 30 separate points made by Skinner…

Shaping functional vocal language is difficult when an individual has not yet acquired an echoic repertoire and does not emit sufficient phonemes (i.e., speech sounds) for shaping. Few studies have evaluated interventions to increase the frequency and breadth of phonemes. The current study extended Esch, Esch, and Love (2009) by evaluating the…

Despite its theoretical importance, the effect of past punishment on verbal behavior is often overlooked in research due to the difficulty of measuring it. The present study explores the relationship between physiological arousal in humans and swearing; a behavior likely to have been punished in the typical conditioning history of an individual.…

Axe (2008) speculated that some instances of intraverbal responding might be associated with limited or delayed acquisition because they require discrimination of multiple components of verbal stimuli. Past studies suggest that acquisition of responses under control of complex, multicomponent antecedent stimuli (e.g., conditional or compound…

Therapists and educators frequently teach alternative-communication systems, such as picture exchanges or manual signs, to individuals with developmental disabilities who present with expressive language deficits. Michael (1985) recommended a taxonomy for alternative communication systems that differentiated between selection-based systems in…

Language generativity can be described as the ability to produce sentences never before said, and to understand sentences never before heard. One process often cited as underlying language generativity is response generalization. However, though the latter seems to promise a technical understanding of the former at a process level, an…

Among many of Jack Michael's contributions to the field of behavior analysis is his behavioral account of motivation. This paper focuses on the concept of "motivating operation" (MO) by outlining its development from Skinner's (1938) notion of "drive." Conceptually, Michael's term helped us change our focus on…

Eleven typically developing children were assessed on the accuracy of prompted self-echoic responses following a 5-s delay from their initial echoic response, replicating procedures in Esch, Esch, McCart, and Petursdottir (2010) that compared discrepancies between echoic and self-echoic scores of autistic and typically developing children…

Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior has been the subject of much controversy in recent years. While criticism has historically come from outside the field of behavior analysis, there are now well-articulated arguments against Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior from within the field as well. Recently, advocates of…

A common characteristic of the language deficits experienced by children with autism (and other developmental disorders) is their failure to acquire a complex intraverbal repertoire. The difficulties with learning intraverbal behaviors may, in part, be related to the fact that the stimulus control for such behaviors usually involves highly complex…

The present comments concern Michael's concept of motivative variables, and the implications of that concept for our understanding of the nature of reinforcement as well as the extinction of responses maintained through positive and negative reinforcement. We note that both extinction and altering motivative variables decrease responding, but…

A series of quotes from B. F. Skinner illustrates the importance of form in his analysis of verbal behavior. In that analysis, form plays an important part in contingency control. Form and function complement each other. Function, the array of variables that control a verbal utterance, dictates the meaning of a specified form; form, as stipulated…

Twenty years ago Michael (1993) refined and extended the concept of the conditioned establishing operation (CEO). With this paper he updated his previous treatment of the topic (Michael, 1982) by providing terminological refinements and conceptually clear descriptions of the reflexive and transitive CEOs. In the 20 years since the publication of…