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Hank Schlinger teaches Introduction to Analysis of Behavior, Psychology of Learning and Behavior, Introduction to Psychology, and History and Systems of Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles. This is his experience in teaching a graduate course in verbal behavior using B.F. Skinner's book.

Which part of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior still intrigues you the most, even after many years of teaching it/studying it?

Would it be a cop out to say the entire book? I mean, when one considers the amount of material covered in the book and the scope of the interpretation, it is mind-boggling. The book is simply a tour de force that even Skinner cited as his most important work. Similar to hearing something new every time I listen to Beethoven’s Eroica, every time I read Verbal Behavior or teach from it, I discover something I didn’t appreciate before. I’m sure that says as much about me as about Skinner. In fact, when I teach the book, I sometimes go line-by-line for a page or more; and each is a profound gem in itself. What a shame that because of one book review by a young arrogant linguist who probably didn’t read the book, and even if he did, didn’t understand it, it was dismissed by generations of language scholars and psychologists.

I’m personally intrigued by how parsimonious the book is. I mean, true to his word, Skinner based the entirety of his interpretation on the four-term (he referred to it as the three-term) contingency, all of which flowed naturally from the basic datum: “the probability that a verbal response of a given form will occur at a given time” (p. 28).

I’m equally intrigued by how the book has immediate practical applications. As Skinner wrote: The formulation is inherently practical and suggests immediate technological applications at almost every step” (p. 12). As most of the students I teach work in applied settings with language-deficient individuals, the applied implications jump out at one all throughout the book.

I’m still impressed with the functional analysis, which is the interpretation, and is an extension of the experimental analysis of nonverbal behavior. In a society in which people still think words have meanings and the two different words can have the same meaning or the same word can have different meanings, Skinner’s functional analysis is a beacon of light. For example, the functional analysis of verbal behavior has wide ranging implications for the understanding of the neurophysiological underpinnings of verbal behavior and also for the teaching of verbal behavior. With regard to the former, it’s impressive that way back in 1957 (and even probably earlier because it took him 23 years to write the book), Skinner’s functional analysis led him to explain parsimoniously many of the facts of aphasia, which haven’t been fully appreciated and which could lead to more effective treatments of behavioral deficits resulting from brain injury.

Which part of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior do you consider as having the deepest implications for understanding human behavior?

Again, my answer is the entire book, but I’ll try to be more specific. Actually, several parts of the book particularly impress me.

I think that the section on echoic behavior is hugely important for several reasons. First, it is the mechanism by which most forms of verbal behavior are learned, contrary to the uninformed musings by Stephen Pinker, including these statements: “The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are such general imitators why don’t they imitate their parents’ habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?)” and “normal children do not learn language by imitating their parents” (Pinker, 1994, p. 38). Second, as I’ve written in several places (Schlinger, 2008a, 2008b), I believe that echoic behavior is the mechanism by which the listener’s behavior is conditioned or, instructed, as Skinner described it and, thus, it is the fundamental mechanism for verbal remembering.  (Even cognitive psychologists acknowledge this when they talk about the importance of rehearsal.)

Following from the point above about instruction, I think another part of Verbal Behavior that has important implications for understanding human behavior is the section in Chapter 14, “Conditioning the Behavior of the Listener,” which as mentioned previously, Skinner also referred to as instructing the behavior of the listener. He only devoted a few pages to this and, oddly, never returned to it in his later writings on rules and rule-governed behavior, which seemed like the perfect opportunity to further explore this effect of verbal stimuli on behavior. I have suggested (Schlinger, 1987, 1993, 2008a) that is perhaps the most unique function of verbal stimuli on behavior, either analogous or homologous to direct operant conditioning.

Another obviously important section is the part of Chapter 5 on tacting private events, which Skinner first explored, at least publically, in his paper, “The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms” (Skinner, 1945) This parsimonious extension of the tact relation obviated the need to infer mental of cognitive events either as data in their own right or as causes of behavior and clearly distinguished radical from methodological behaviorism.

Last, but not least, is the chapter on Multiple Causation. It is well known, but perhaps not fully appreciated, even by behavior analysts, that nonverbal behavior is multiple caused, and Skinner extends that concept to verbal behavior with some surprising results. Particularly interesting to me is the notion that separate sources of strength are additive. Analogous to the firing of neurons, which is the result of the algebraic summation of excitatory and inhibitory inputs, the appearance of a verbal response is a combined result of many separate sources of strength, some reinforcing and some weakening. This concept also helps to explain the continuum of observability of verbal behavior from sub-audible to audible.

Which part(s) of Skinner’s book have you found to be the most challenging for your students? Do you have an opinion as to why this is the case?

The answer is pretty much the entire book. The book was not written as a textbook, so students who are used to textbooks have a very difficult time organizing the reading. For example, on page 22, Skinner writes, “We base the notion of strength on several kinds of evidence.”  He then lists four: emission, energy level, speed, and repetition.  He follows those with a heading, “Limitations on Evidence of Strength,” and the reader assumes he is finished. But then under the next section “Over-all Frequency,” Skinner writes: A third type of evidence is  . . .” That is confusing. Moreover, the writing in the book is obtuse, because the style is that of an elite intellectual. Skinner was presumably writing for an educated audience, but in reality, he was writing mostly for an audience of one: himself. The book is all the more amazing because Skinner himself was the only verbal community for writing it.

Are there common/recurrent observations from your students concerning Skinner’s book, that you can share with us and that might be considered as an indicator of your students’ appreciation, affection, or disaffection for Skinner’s work?

Students find the book almost impossible to read without help. What I try to do when teaching it is to constantly remind students that, no matter its difficulty, the book is really just an extension of the basic unit of behavior analysis—the functional four-term contingency—to behavior Skinner called “verbal.” Of course, once they “get it,” students appreciate the power and elegance of the extension of the basic principles derived from the animal laboratory to that most human of behaviors—language.

What criticisms have students made about Skinner’s book?

Students, and probably most other readers, find the many examples of and extensions to literature uninteresting, in part because they are not familiar with the literary sources Skinner cites. I think students find more familiar examples from their own lives more compelling.

Can you remember any unusual or particularly thought-provoking question a student has posed as a result of their reading of Skinner’s book?

Students often wonder about Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior as behavior reinforced through the mediation of others who have been specifically trained to mediate the reinforcement. This definition seems to be only or mostly appropriate for the mand relation unless one wants to extend the notion of mediating reinforcement to the direct delivery of reinforcement that happens in the other elementary relations in which the speaker provides generalized conditioned reinforcement. I handle this confusion by simply telling students that the definition is not that important for the overall analysis. Whether reinforcement for the speaker’s behavior is mediated or delivered directly by the listener, the important point is that without listeners or an audience reinforcing, there would be no behavior we would call verbal.

Of course, a few behavior analysts have criticized Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior, and others have defended it. My take is as follows: Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior comprises about two pages in an otherwise 460 page book and if one ripped out those pages, the book wouldn’t not lose any of its interpretative power and elegance.

References

Blakely E., & Schlinger, H. D. (1987). Rules: Function-altering contingency-specifying stimuli. The Behavior Analyst, 10, 183-187

Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York: Harper Collins.

Schlinger, H. D. (1993).  Separating discriminative and function-altering effects of verbal stimuli.  The Behavior Analyst, 16, 9-23.

Schlinger, H. D. (2008a). Conditioning the behavior of the listener. International Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy, 8, 309-322.

Schlinger, H. D. (2008b). Listening is behaving verbally. The Behavior Analyst, 31, 145-161.

Skinner, B. F. (1945). The operational analysis of psychological terms. Psychological Review, 52, 268–277.

Skinner B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts

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