Author: B. F. Skinner Foundation

How a stimulus or some property of a stimulus acquires control over a given form of response is now fairly well understood. The form of a response is shaped by…

... how a word “stands for” a thing or “means” what the speaker intends to say or “communicates” some condition of a thing to a listener has never been satisfactorily…

What do pyramidality, poetry, chair, red, or foxy really “mean”? If we try to answer this by discovering what they “mean to us,” we are behaving empirically, although under a…

Abstraction is a peculiarly verbal process because a nonverbal environment cannot provide the necessary restricted contingency (p. 109)

Our definition of verbal behavior, incidentally, includes the behavior of experimental animals where reinforcements are supplied by an experimenter or by an apparatus designed to establish contingencies which resemble those…

Some extended control is ... permissible and even useful, but a free extension of the tact cannot be tolerated, particularly in practical and scientific matters. The verbal community deals with…

The tact is a relation, not merely a response, and in the absence of a controlling stimulus no relation can be established. (p. 105)

Unfortunately, metaphor is also often useful when there is nothing to say. John Horne Tooke pointed this out: “ ... Similes ... are frequently found most useful to the authors…

Literature is prescientific in the sense that it talks about things or events before science steps in—and is less inclined to talk about them afterward. (p. 98)

Metaphorical extension is most useful when no other response is available. In a novel situation to which no generic term can be extended, the only effective behavior may be metaphorical.…

Verbal behavior would be much less effective if metaphorical extension were not possible. Even when a nonextended tact is available, the metaphor may have an advantage. It may be more…

Where is a man when he is “on top of the world” or when he has “suffered a moral fall”? How do we “shut our eyes to the truth”? Answers…

Sometimes a genuine extension seems to occur when no similarity between stimuli expressible in the terms of physical science can be demonstrated. There are several possible explanations. Two stimuli may…

A second type of extension takes place because of the control exercised by properties of the stimulus which, though present at reinforcement, do not enter into the contingency respected by…

To discover the “essence” of chair, we should have to examine the actual contingencies of reinforcement in a given community. (p. 91)

The property which makes a novel stimulus effective may be the property upon which reinforcements supplied by the community are contingent. This “generic extension” is illustrated when a speaker calls…

A given object does not remain the inevitable occasion for the reinforcement of an appropriate response, and the probability of response therefore comes to vary with the occasion. The listener…

The practical behavior of the listener with respect to the verbal stimulus produced by a tact follows the same three-term relation which has already been used in analyzing the behavior…

Theories of meaning usually consider the behaviors of both speaker and listener at the same time. The practice is encouraged by the notion of the “use of words,” which appears…

In very general terms we may say that behavior in the form of the tact works for the benefit of the listener by extending his contact with the environment, and…

Verbal behavior in which the reinforcement is thoroughly generalized, and the control of which therefore rests almost exclusively with the environment, is developed by the methods of science. The reinforcing…

A tact which is established with a completely generalized reinforcement might be called “pure” or “objective”... A truly generalized reinforcement is, however, rare ... and pure objectivity in this sense…

Roughly speaking, the mand permits the listener to infer something about the condition of the speaker regardless of external circumstances, while the tact permits him to infer something about the…

It may be tempting to say that in a tact the response “refers to,” “mentions,” “announces,” “talks about,” “names,” “denotes,” or “describes” its stimulus. But the ... only useful functional…

The invented term “tact” will be used here. The term carries a mnemonic suggestion of behavior which “makes contact with” the physical world. A tact may be defined as a…

In all verbal behavior under stimulus control there are three important events to be taken into account: a stimulus, a response, and a reinforcement. These are contingent upon each other…

All verbal behavior is, of course, borrowed in the sense of being acquired from other people. (p. 73)

Most of the “facts” of history are acquired and retained as intraverbal responses. (p. 72)

In echoic behavior and in writing from copy there is a formal correspondence between stimulus and response-product. In textual behavior and in taking dictation there is a point-to-point correspondence between…

In echoic behavior, the correspondence upon which reinforcement is based may serve as an automatic conditioned reinforcer. The speaker who is also an accomplished listener “knows when he has correctly…

Why the family, the community, and educational agencies arrange ... [reinforcement of textual behavior] is to be explained in terms of the ultimate advantages gained from having an additional literate…

Since the term “reading” usually refers to many processes at the same time, the narrower term “textual behavior” will be used here. In the textual operant, then, a vocal response…

In all kinds of self-echoic behavior we have to consider the possibility that the verbal stimulus may be covert. (p. 65)

Since a speaker usually hears himself and thus stimulates himself verbally, he can also echo himself. Such behavior is potentially self-reinforcing if it strengthens stimulation used in the control of…

The degree of accuracy insisted upon by a given reinforcing community is important. In general, the speaker does no more than is demanded of him. (p. 63)

We pick up a large part of our verbal repertoire by echoing the behavior of others under circumstances which eventually control the behavior non-echoically. (p. 62)

The first echoic operants acquired by a child tend to be fairly large integral patterns, and they are of little help in permitting him to echo novel patterns. A unit…

The development of a large echoic repertoire appropriate to a given language makes it harder to echo verbal stimuli which do not belong in the language. (p. 61)

Early echoic behavior in young children is often very wide of the mark; the parent must reinforce very imperfect matches to keep the behavior in strength at all. We might…

Echoic behavior, like all verbal behavior, is shaped and maintained by certain contingencies of reinforcement. The formal similarity between stimulus and response is part of these contingencies and can be…

The young child alone in the nursery may automatically reinforce his own exploratory vocal behavior when he produces sounds which he has heard in the speech of others ... The…

Echoic behavior is easily confused with responses which are self-reinforcing because they resemble the speech of others heard at some other time. When a sound pattern has been associated with…

Echoic responses are useful and reinforced when they serve as fill-ins. In answer to the question What will happen to the international situation during the next few weeks? the student…

There are .. many indirect sources of echoic reinforcement. For example, we are reinforced for echoing verbal forms emitted by others in a conversation because these forms are more likely…

An echoic repertoire is established in the child through “educational” reinforcement because it is useful to parents, teachers, and others. It makes possible a short-circuiting of the process of progressive…

A fragmentary echoic behavior is evident when one speaker adopts the accent or mannerisms of another in the course of a sustained conversation. If one member of a group whispers,…

In a conversation, for example, a slightly atypical response is often picked up and passed from speaker to speaker. The two halves of a dialogue will generally have more words…

A fragmentary self-echoic behavior ... may be shown in reduplicative forms like helter-skelter, razzle-dazzle, and willy-nilly. (p. 56)

Mands of the general form Say ‘X’ characteristically produce responses in the listener showing a point-to-point correspondence between the sound of the stimulus and the sound of the response. But…

In the simplest case in which verbal behavior is under the control of verbal stimuli, the response generates a sound pattern similar to that of the stimulus. For example, upon…