Twenty years ago, an anthropological note described the current dimensions of applied behavior analysis as it was prescribed and practiced in 1968: It was, or ought to become, applied, behavioral, analytic, technological, conceptual, effective, and capable of appropriately generalized outcomes. A similar anthropological note today finds the same dimensions still prescriptive, and to an increasing extent, descriptive. Several new tactics have become evident, however, some in the realm of conceptual analysis, some in the sociological status of the discipline, and some in its understanding of the necessary systemic nature of any applied discipline that is to operate in the domain of important human behaviors.

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Forty families were selected to represent the range of typical American families in size, race, and socioeconomic status. In data from 2Vi years of once-monthly, hour-long observations of unstructured parent-child interactions in the home, parenting was examined over 27 months, including the time before, during, and after all the children learned to talk. Ten parent measures suggested by the literature all showed stability in expression within families across time but large differences among the 40 families. The 10 parenting variables clustered into 3 factors relating to (a) the absolute amount of parenting per hour, (b) parents' social interaction with their children, and (c) the contentive quality of the utterances parents addressed to their children. The amount of parenting per hour and the quality of the verbal content associated with that parenting were strongly related to the social and economic status of the family and the subsequent IQ of the child.

"Incidental teaching" denotes a process whereby language skills of labelling and describing are learned in naturally occurring adult-child interactions. In the present study, 15-min daily samples of the spontaneous speech of 11 children were recorded during free play over eight months of preschool. After incidental teaching of compound sentences, increases in unprompted use of compound sentences were seen for all the children, first directed to teachers, and then to children, in accordance with who attended to the children's requests for play materials. The incidental teaching procedure also stimulated spontaneous variety in speech, and appears to have general applicability to child learning settings.

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