Verbal behavior
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| Author | B. F. Skinner |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Human Language, Communication, Speech, Linguistics |
| Publisher | Copley Publishing Group |
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Publication date
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1957, 1992 |
| Pages | 478 |
| ISBN | (case), (pbk.) |
| OCLC | 251221179 |
Verbal Behavior is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he inspects human behavior, describing what is traditionally called linguistics. The book Verbal Behavior is almost entirely theoretical, involving little experimental research in the work itself. It was an outgrowth of a series of lectures first presented at the University of Minnesota in the early 1940s and developed further in his summer lectures at Columbia and William James lectures at Harvard in the decade before the book's publication. A growing body of research and applications based on Verbal Behavior has occurred since its original publication, particularly in the past decade.
In addition, a growing body of research has developed on structural topics in verbal behavior such as grammar.
This is now sometimes called the four-term contingency model with setting conditions added as a fourth term. This consists of a motivating operation (MO), discriminative stimulus (SD), response (R), and reinforcement (Srein). Skinner's Verbal Behavior also introduced the and six elementary operants: mand, tact, audience relation, echoic, textual, and intraverbal. For Skinner, the proper object of study is behavior itself, analyzed without reference to hypothetical (mental) structures, but rather with reference to the functional relationships of the behavior in the environment in which it occurs. This analysis extends Ernst Mach's pragmatic inductive position in physics, and extends even further a disinclination towards hypothesis-making and testing.Verbal Behavior is divided into 5 parts with 19 chapters. The first chapter sets the stage for this work, a functional analysis of verbal behavior. Skinner presents verbal behavior as a function of controlling consequences and stimuli, not as the product of a special inherent capacity. Neither does he ask us to be satisfied with simply describing the structure, or patterns, of behavior. Skinner deals with some alternative, traditional formulations, and moves on to his own functional position.
In the ascertaining of the strength of a response Skinner suggests some criteria for strength (probability): emission, energy-level, speed, repetition, but notes that these are all very limited means for inferring the strength of a response as they do not always vary together as they may come under the control of other factors. Emission is a yes/no measure, however the other three—energy-level, speed, repetition—comprise possible indications of relative strength.
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