Verbal Behavior

On Intraverbal Control and the Definition of the Intraverbal

“…Such Bprimingê ffects are usually too weak, under normal circumstances, to evoke any one intraverbal response directly, but they can be detected by special experimental procedures such as measuring the decreased latencies to emit those responses to corresponding textual stimuli (Neely, 1991), or by recording distinctive electroencephalographic responses (Ortu, 2012). For discussions of the relevance of such experiments to behavioral phenomena, see Donahoe and Palmer (2011) and Palmer (2009Palmer ( , 2014. To make the point a different way, if someone responded to the stimulus dog by saying beagle, we would call the response an intraverbal in the narrow sense, but we would presumably fail to observe that the stimulus dog had a simultaneous effect on the probability of emitting many incompatible responses as well.…”

“…The frames in such examples are intraverbal; that is, they form the lattice into which variable terms are inserted according to context. As I have discussed autoclitic frames at length elsewhere (e.g., Donahoe & Palmer 2011;Palmer, 1998;20092014), I will merely remind the reader that the frame comes to strength in characteristic contexts (e.g., calling someone, inspecting something, giving something, comparing sizes, computing square roots) because of a history in which intraverbal control was established over the fixed elements of the frame. The variable terms come to strength according to the context.…”

“…Any answer to a question is an intraverbal under this reading, for indeed the answer is clearly a response to a prior verbal stimulus. Under the narrow reading, an intraverbal is a verbal response directly under control of a prior verbal stimulus as the result of a history of reinforcement for emitting that response in the presence of that stimulus (Palmer, 2014). The difference is revealed in the following exchange:…”

“…But this is indeed a misconception. Examples of pure verbal operants are rare outside the laboratory or classroom; almost all verbal behavior is multiply controlled (Michael, Palmer, & Sundberg, 2011;Palmer 2014;Skinner, 1957;. Moreover, Bclassification is not an end in itself^ (Skinner, 1957, p. 187); our task is not primarily to classify behavior but to identify its controlling variables.…”

Can Collateral Behavior Account for Transitions in the Stimulus Control of Speech?

“…Stimulus control must shift just as rapidly as sequences of operants, and that is very fast indeed. As I have argued elsewhere (Palmer, 1998(Palmer, , 2008(Palmer, , 2014, possible controlling variables include the stimulus properties of one's own speech as well as the blizzard of correlated discriminative responses to both one's own speech and the present context. These discriminative responses are commonly covert, and to invoke them renders the relevant interpretive exercise open to charges of circularity, particularly if they are merely invented to plug an explanatory gap in one's account.…”