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…

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…

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…

The current study assessed the use of standard conditional discrimination (i.e., listener) and textual/tact (i.e., speaker) training in the establishment of equivalence classes containing dictated names, tacts/textual responses, pictures and printed words. Four children (ages 5 to 7 years) diagnosed with autism were taught to select pictures and…

Clinical behavior analysis often targets the shaping of clients' functional interpretations of/or rules about his own behavior. These are referred to as clinically relevant behavior 3 (CRB3) in functional analytic psychotherapy (FAP). We suggest that CRB3s should be seen as contingency-specifying stimuli (CSS), due to the their ability to change…

Amid the novel terms and original analyses in Skinner's "Verbal Behavior", the importance of his discussion of multiple control is easily missed, but multiple control of verbal responses is the rule rather than the exception. In this paper we summarize and illustrate Skinner's analysis of multiple control and introduce the terms "convergent…

Results of a survey sent to members of the editorial boards of five behavior-analytic journals in 1990 indicated that there was no consensus among respondents with respect to whether delayed events can function as reinforcers (Schlinger, Blakely, Fillhard, & Poling, 1991). Since that time, several studies with nonhuman animals have demonstrated…

A popular-press self-help manual is reviewed with an eye toward two issues. First, the popularity of such books documents the existence of considerable demand for technologies that address the everyday problems (in the present case, troublesome conversations) of nondisordered individuals. Second, many ideas invoked in popular-press books may be…

"The Analysis of Verbal Behavior" ("TAVB") publishes experimental and theoretical papers relevant to a behavioral analysis of language. Normand, Fossa, and Poling (2000) reviewed the published studies in "TAVB" across several dimensions and found that despite the growth of the journal, most articles published in "TAVB" from 1982 to 1998 were…

Aphasia is an acquired language impairment that affects over 1 million individuals, the majority of whom are over age 65 (Groher, 1989). This disorder has typically been conceptualized within a cognitive neuroscience framework, but a behavioral interpretation of aphasia is also possible. Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior proposes a…

Conditional discrimination is inherent in the intraverbal relation when one verbal stimulus alters the evocative effect of another verbal stimulus and they collectively evoke an intraverbal response. Rarely in research on conditional discriminations have both conditional and discriminative stimuli been vocal verbal and rarely have the responses…

Chomsky's (1959) review of Skinner's (1957) "Verbal Behavior" has been influential and attributed with a role in the cognitive revolution. However, while counter reviews from within behavior analysis have noted that Chomsky misunderstood the subject matter, certain aspects of his scholarship have been underdiscussed. This includes several…

This paper outlines a behavior-analysis approach to the field of narratology, the study of the narrative or story, with emphasis on nonfiction stories and the processes by which such stories distort the world they describe. Stories are described in terms of (a) a behavior-analysis adaptation of Todorov's (1977) analysis of the plots of stories in…

Few studies have made use of B. F. Skinner's (1957) behavioral analysis of language and precise taxonomy of verbal behavior when describing the controlling variables for the mand relation. Consequently, the motivating operation (MO) has not typically been identified as an independent variable and the nature of a spontaneous mand has been…

Behavior analysts have offered accounts of the behavior involved in matching to sample and delayed matching to sample. But until recently have not offered a behavioral analysis of generalized matching-to-sample. The concept of joint control, however, seems especially suited to such an analysis The present study used a joint-control procedure to…