Empirical Investigations of the Intraverbal: 2005-2015

Differential effect of training impure tacts versus pure tacts plus intraverbal on the emergence of new verbal operants: A conceptual and methodological study

The aim of this research was to test the effect of training impure tact versus pure tact and intraverbals on the emergence of new verbal operants (impure tacts), thus establishing a conceptual and methodological differentiation on these operants. This was done by varying the training order of intraverbal or impure tact to analyze and confirm whether or not impure tact is the mere sum of pure tact plus intraverbal and therefore has different functions and consequences in learning. An experiment was conducted with 30 participants randomly assigned to three groups. In Group 1, pure tact plus intraverbal and then impure tact were trained. In Group 3 the training order of these operants was counterbalanced. Group 2 was the control group, training only pure tact plus intraverbal. After the training phases, the emergence of impure tacts was tested. The results of this research indicate that the training of impure tacts favors the emergence of new impure tacts to a greater extent than the training of pure tact plus intraverbal and that they therefore have different functions. It is also shown that variation in the order of presentation of the type of training influences the subsequent emergence of new operants (impure tacts), so that creating a previous history of learning in impure tacts favors emergence even when the intraverbal alone is subsequently trained. This has important implications at both conceptual and methodological levels as it would contribute to the development of more effective language training technologies.

The Use of Multiple Exemplar Instruction to Induce Emergent Listener Discriminations and Emergent Intraverbal Vocal Responses in Autistic Children

This study tested for the emergence of listener discriminations and intraverbal vocal responses following tact training with four autistic children. All participants were trained to tact the name and the favorite food of two contrived cartoon monsters in the presence of a picture of the monster (e.g., "What is the name of this monster?" - "Max" and "What food does the monster eat?" - "Sweets") to evaluate the effects of emergent listener discriminations and emergent intraverbal vocal responses. Once criterion was met on the tact training, participants were tested for emergent listener discriminations (e.g., "Who eats sweets?" And "Who is Max?") and emergent intraverbal vocal responses (e.g., "What food does Max eat?" - "Sweets" and "Who eats sweets?" - "Max" in the absence of the picture). After training, all four participants engaged in emergent listener responding but only one participant engaged in emergent intraverbal responding. Multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) was used to teach those who could not engage in emergent intraverbal responding, and it was demonstrated to be effective. These findings are educationally significant because efficiency of instruction is important to maximize instructional impact, and to reduce the time and resource-intensive nature of behavior-analytic programming.

Intraverbal Assessment for Persons with Aphasia or Other Acquired Brain Injury

An intraverbal assessment was administered to older adults with aphasia, using a hierarchy of questions that required increasingly complex verbal discriminative stimulus control. Five categories of errors were defined and analyzed for putative stimulus control, with the aim to identify requisite assessment components leading to more efficient and effective treatments. Evocative control over intraverbal error responses was evident throughout the database, as shown by commonalities within four distinct categories of errors; a fifth category, representing a narrow majority of errors, was less clear in terms of functional control over responses. Generally, questions requiring increasingly complex intraverbal stimulus control resulted in weaker verbal performance for those with aphasia. A new 9-point intraverbal assessment model is proposed, based on Skinner's functional analysis of verbal behavior. The study underscores that loss or disruption of a formerly sophisticated language repertoire presents differently than the fledgling language skills and errors of new learners, such as typically developing children and those with autism or developmental disabilities. Thus, we would do well to consider that rehabilitation may require a different approach to intervention than habilitation. We offer several thematic topics for future research in this area.

Simultaneous Prompting to Teach Intraverbal Synonyms to Struggling Readers

In simultaneous prompting procedures, an immediate (i.e., 0-s) prompt is presented during all training trials, and transfer to the target discriminative condition is assessed during daily probes. Previous research suggests that simultaneous prompting procedures are efficacious and may produce acquisition in fewer errors to mastery when compared to prompt delay procedures. To date, only a single study on simultaneous prompting has included intraverbal targets. The current study evaluated the efficacy of a simultaneous prompting procedure on the acquisition of intraverbal synonyms for six children at risk for reading failure. Simultaneous prompting alone produced responding at mastery levels in seven of the 12 evaluations. Antecedent-based procedural modifications were effective in four of the five remaining evaluations. Errors were generally low for all but one participant. The current findings support the use of simultaneous prompting procedures when targeting intraverbals for young children exhibiting reading deficits.

Overcoming Barriers to Applied Research: A Guide for Practitioners

The research-to-practice gap is evident in many disciplines. This gap can be seen through practitioners failing to integrate the latest research findings into their work, and through the implementation of procedures that do not have empirical support. As the number of behavior-analytic practitioners grows, this gap is likely to become more salient. One solution to closing the gap is for practitioners to conduct applied research. This survey study aimed to identify specific barriers that practitioners face when conducting research, to identify how valuable conducting research is to practitioners, and to make recommendations to support research productivity in practice. We report results from survey questions about applied research and provide practical recommendations for practitioners to overcome barriers and to begin conducting research during their clinical work.

Behavioral skills training to increase interview skills of adolescent males in a juvenile residential treatment facility

Some studies suggest that acquiring employment following release from prison may reduce recidivism; however, few studies have evaluated procedures for teaching job-related skills to adolescents in residential detention facilities. Stocco et al. (2017) used behavioral skills training (BST) to improve interview skills of college students. The current study used a nonconcurrent multiple baseline design across participants to evaluate the extent to which BST improved interview skills for 7 adolescents who had been adjudicated for sexual offenses. Results show that BST increased appropriate responses to interview questions for 4 students and BST plus modifications (i.e., stimulus and response prompts) increased correct responding to questions for the other 3. In addition, BST increased appropriate questions, correct posture, and smiling, and decreased fidgeting for all 7 students. We briefly discuss the social implications of teaching interview skills to adjudicated adolescents, as well as the limitations of the findings.

Increasing Response Diversity to Intraverbals in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of intraverbal prompts on response diversity and novelty in intraverbals posed to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The intraverbal prompts involving function, feature, and class (FFC) of an item were used in the training of three questions requiring multiple responses. Two Chinese boys with ASD (aged 5-6 years) served as participants. A multiple-probe across three behaviors design was employed. The results indicated that the intraverbal prompts effectively increased the number of divergent responses to all three questions. Novel responses emerged at a low level while generalization to similar questions was not observed following the training.

Evaluating the Effects of Similar and Distinct Discriminative Stimuli During Auditory Conditional Discrimination Training With Children With Autism

Children with autism are often taught auditory conditional discriminations in the form of personal information questions that might prove useful in conversation (e.g., "What is your favorite food?" "Pizza" and "What is your favorite color?" "Purple"). In these questions, the auditory stimuli presented as part of the compound discriminative stimulus (i.e., what, favorite, color/food) do not always simultaneously control responding. If all components of the auditory stimulus do not control responding, a child may master 1 target but have trouble acquiring subsequent targets that have a component of a previously learned auditory stimulus because the previously learned response is emitted. One way to avoid this problem is to teach many targets that have no overlapping component stimuli before introducing targets that include a previously learned component. Another way to avoid the problem is to systematically introduce overlapping stimulus components simultaneously to facilitate control by all relevant components. Three children with autism were taught auditory conditional discriminations. An adapted alternating-treatments design was used to compare the use of training sets with programmed overlap of component auditory stimuli to training sets with no overlap of stimulus components. The effects of these 2 arrangements were evaluated on trials to criterion and percentage accuracy during acquisition. All participants reached mastery faster with at least 1 target set in the nonoverlap condition compared to the overlapping condition; 2 out of the 3 participants met the mastery criteria for both overlapping and nonoverlapping targets at a similar rate by the 3rd training set.

Reflections on Verbal Behavior at 60

In the present essay, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the publication of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, I stand by and defend the judgment I expressed in my article "The Long Goodbye: Why B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior Is Alive and Well on the 50th Anniversary of Its Publication" (2008c)-that Skinner's "interpretation of the behavior of the speaker, given the contingencies of reinforcement maintained by the community" (Skinner, 1987, p. 11), is not only adequate but is also consistent with the principles of operant learning. To that I add some of my reflections on the book after having taught it for years and having written numerous articles extending Skinner's analysis to related topics.

The impact of Verbal Behavior on the scholarly literature from 2005 to 2016

B. F. Skinner's (1957) Verbal Behavior had a limited influence on empirical research in the first few decades following its publication, but an increase in empirical activity has been evident in recent years. The purpose of this article is to update previous analyses that have quantified the influence of Verbal Behavior on the scholarly literature, with an emphasis on its impact on empirical research. Study 1 was a citation analysis that showed an increase in citations to Verbal Behavior from 2005 to 2016 relative to earlier time periods. In particular, there was a large increase in citations from empirical articles. Study 2 identified empirical studies in which a verbal operant was manipulated or measured, regardless of whether or not Verbal Behavior was cited, and demonstrated a large increase in publication rate, with an increasing trend in the publication of both basic and applied experimental analyses throughout the review period. A majority of the studies were concerned with teaching verbal behavior to children with autism spectrum disorder and other developmental disabilities, but a variety of other basic and applied research topics were also represented. The results suggest a clearly increasing impact of Verbal Behavior on the experimental analysis of behavior on the 60th anniversary of the book's publication.

Empirical Application of Skinner's Verbal Behavior to Interventions for Children with Autism: A Review

Sundberg and Michael (2011) reviewed the contributions of Skinner's (1957) Verbal Behavior to the treatment of language delays in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and discussed several aspects of interventions, including mand training, intraverbal repertoire development, and the importance of using Skinner's taxonomy of verbal behavior in the clinical context. In this article, we provide an update of Sundberg and Michael's review and expand on some discussion topics. We conducted a systematic review of studies that focused on Skinner's verbal operants in interventions for children with ASD that were published from 2001 to 2017 and discussed the findings in terms of journal source, frequency, and type of verbal operant studied.

Verbal Stimulus Control and the Intraverbal Relation

The importance of the intraverbal relation is missed in most theories of language. Skinner (1957) attributes this to traditional semantic theories of meaning that focus on the nonverbal referents of words and neglect verbal stimuli as separate sources of control for linguistic behavior. An analysis of verbal stimulus control is presented, along with its distinction from nonverbal stimulus control and motivational control. It is suggested that there are at least four different types of increasingly complex verbal discriminations relevant to speaker and listener behavior: simple, compound, verbal conditional, and verbal function-altering (Eikeseth & Smith, 2013; Schlinger & Blakely, 1994). Separate but interlocking accounts of how these specific types of verbal stimuli produce different evocative and function-altering effects for the speaker and for the listener are provided. Finally, the effects of weakening verbal stimulus control and the loss of intraverbal behavior are considered, especially as they relate to dementia, aphasia, and traumatic brain injury.