Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children presents a long-term study of the early, parentally supplied verbal environment of children and its association with a child's daily vocabulary and with later test scores. As such it provides a detailed and direct assessment of the effects of specific family interactions, especially those concerned with language development. In an introduction to the book, Lois Bloom termed Hart and Risley's effort "heroic," and indeed it seems so. Approximately 1,300 hour-long observations were painstakingly recorded, codified, and analyzed over the course of the study.1 Authors Betty Hart and Todd Risley are well known to the field of behavior analysis and single-subject design. Their book reports on a study of a different sort and of a type atypical of behavior analysis. Employing both descriptive and inferential statistical analyses of longitudinal data, the study could aptly be termed actuarial. In this sense it is more typical of traditional developmental psychological research that entails longitudinal study of children's natural environments. Finally, the study is exemplary as a model of this type of research because of its Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore: Brookes.

Several recent studies have been concerned with operant responses that are also affected by nonoperant factors, (e.g., biological constraints, innate behavior patterns, respondent processes). The major reason for studying mynah vocal responding concerned the special relation of avian vocalizations to nonoperant emotional and reflexive systems. The research strategy was to evaluate operant and nonoperant control by comparing the schedule control obtained with the vocal response to that characteristic of the motor responses of other animals. We selected single, multiple, and chain schedules that ordinarily produce disparate response rates at predictable times. In multiple schedules with one component where vocal responding ("Awk") was reinforced with food (fixed-ratio or fixed-interval schedule) and one where the absence of vocal responding was reinforced (differential reinforcement of other behavior), response rates never exceeded 15 responses per minute, but clear schedule differences developed in response rate and pause time. Nonoperant vocal responding was evident when responding endured across 50 extinction sessions at 25% to 40% of the rate during reinforcement. The "enduring extinction responding" was largely deprivation induced, because the operant-level of naive mynahs under food deprivation was comparable in magnitude, but without deprivation the operant level was much lower. Food deprivation can induce vocal responding, but the relatively precise schedule control indicated that operant contingencies predominate when they are introduced.

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Jack Michael was an early enthusiast for what is now called applied behavior analysis. His many seminal contributions were through early publications in applied behavior analysis and the work of the students he trained (e.g., T. Ayllon, M. M. Wolf). His close mentorship of students earned him acclaim as a teacher along with his many theoretical contributions to the literatures on verbal behavior and motivation, and behavior analysis in general. This paper is a series of personal reflections about Michael's time and contributions at the University of Houston and Arizona State University, which preceded his lengthy tenure at Western Michigan University, where he spent the remainder of his career and is now an emeritus professor.

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