Some verbal behavior about verbal behavior

Beginning with behavior analysts' tendency to characterize verbal behavior as "mere" verbal behavior, the author reviews his own attempt to employ it to influence both his staff and policies of our government. He then describes its role in psychopathology, its effect on speakers in healing themselves and on engendering creativity. The paper ends by calling to our attention the role of verbal behavior in the construction of behavior analysis.     

Effects of verbal imitation and comprehension training on verbal production

This study sought to determine whether some combination of imitation training and comprehension training was necessary to achieve verbal production or whether comprehension training alone was sufficient to result in verbal production. Fifty-one first- and second-grade subjects were trained to imitate eight words (Spanish nouns) for which there were no referents. An additional set of eight words was trained in a comprehension task where overt verbal rehearsal was prohibited. Once criterion of two successive sessions of 100% performance was reached in training for both imitation and comprehension, training modes were reversed so that items initially trained in imitation were then trained in comprehension andvice versa. Results showed that initial comprehension training did result in some verbal production, whereas initial imitation training, as expected, did not. A marked improvement in verbal production performance was observed when initial comprehension training was followed by imitation training. When initial imitation training was followed by comprehension training, verbal production also resulted but not to the degree or with the consistency of performance which marked the comprehension-then-imitation sequence. Furthermore, comprehension training required more trials to reach a similar level of proficiency when it followed imitation training than when it preceded imitation. These data indicate that initial imitation training interferes with acquisition of subsequent comprehension and production responses and that the preferred training sequence is one which initially focuses on comprehension and follows this with verbal imitation.This study was supported by Grant HD 00870 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and Grant NS 10468 from the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke awarded to the Bureau of Child Research, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas.     

The role of verbal ability in the processing of complex verbal information

Summary This study investigated the relation between psychometric mental-ability test scores and several reaction-time measures; a simple-reaction task, a choice-reaction task, the Posner and Mitchell (1967) letter-identification task, and a variation of the sentence-verification task. Scores on the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Verbal Subtest of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SATV) were obtained. The less complex information-processing tasks replicate earlier studies in which general intelligence was only marginally related to reaction-time measures. The sentence-verification task systematically varied task complexity. Several direct and derived measures from the task were significantly correlated with psychometric mentalability measures. However, even though a number of precautions were taken to ensure that the sentence-verification task assessed purely verbal-processing efficiency, there was little evidence for an important task-specific relation between verification measures and verbal ability. Moreover, despite its relative verbal complexity, sentence verification did not reflect a greater relationship to verbal ability than other tasks did. Overall, the information-processing efficiency measures used in this study suggested a fairly general, rather than a task-specific, relationship to intellectual ability.The research presented in this paper was conducted while the first author was affiliated with the University of Georgia, U. S. A.     

De-polarizing verbal irony

In three studies participants were asked to rate the degree of irony perceived in comments relating to five variations of a scenario, ranging from one pole to the opposite pole and passing through three in-between states. In study 1, the comments pertained to the polar extremes of a dimension, e.g. “It’s uphill!” stated with reference to varying degrees of steepness both uphill and downhill (i.e. steep, slightly steep, flat, slightly sloping downhill and steeply sloping downhill). In study 2, the comments were of an “intermediate” nature (e.g. “This hill is neither uphill nor downhill!”) and, as in Study 1, they were used to refer to the same five varying degrees of the same dimension. Study 3 involved the stimuli from both of the first two experiments in a between-participants design.

The results consistently demonstrated that verbal irony does not only apply to (weakly or strongly) polarised statements and situations, but it can also apply to intermediate comments and experiences. The perceptual structure of the dimensions involved modulates the effect.     

Mother-child verbal interchange: A descriptive study of young children's verbal behavior

The theoretical importance of the linguistic data available to the child in his natural environment has been increasingly emphasized in recent work on child language acquisition. This study sought to describe a portion of such data as contained in maternal verbal behavior and to analyze its influence on the child's usage of speech. The subjects were five 21-month-old children and their mothers. The mother-child verbal interchange was recorded during free-play situations carried out both at the subject's home and in a playroom. The interactive patterns of mother-child utterances were analyzed with regard to the kind and frequency of verbalizations, and the temporal intervals between them. Results showed that the temporal pattern of mother-child interchanges was characterized by significantly shorter pauses (<2 s) for mothers than for children. A variation in this pattern, consisting of pauses longer than 4 s, was associated with certain kinds of ongoing mother-child verbal behaviors. Thus mothers showed selectiveness, in varying degrees, in responding to the child's utterances, and their verbal responses had differential effects on the child's subsequent verbal performance. These effects were described as “initiating”, “maintaining”, or “ending” verbal chains, or else as “non-reacted” utternances. Moreover, the amount of verbalization by the children was positively correlated with the proportion of the mother's output that consisted of immediate responses to the child, and not with the total verbal output.     

Adolescent verbal behavior

This investigation assessed the relationship of race and delinquent status with the noncontent verbal behavior of adolescent males. A standardized videotape interview was used to ensure consistent stimulus presentation. Sixteen white and sixteen black delinquents were compared with equal numbers of nondelinquents on the noncontent verbal measures of total time (performance time), units (frequency), and latency. It was predicted that nondelinquents would be more verbal than delinquents and whites would be more verbal than blacks. No racial differences were found. Delinquents, however, were found to talk significantly less than nondelinquents and to have significantly longer verbal latencies. Discussion of these results centered on the verbal demand characteristics of certain settings, such as classrooms and court hearings.     

The validity of verbal protocols

The reactivity of a "think aloud" verbal protocol and the veridicality of different retrospective protocols were tested over four dissimilar tasks. Generating a concurrent protocol altered accuracy in two tasks, simple addition and a choice between two gambles, and generally prolonged response times. Such reactivity partially qualifies the dominant theory of protocol generation (Ericsson & Simon, 1984). Retrospective protocols yielded substantial forgetting or fabrication in all tasks, supporting the consensus on the nonveridicality of these methods. It is concluded that protocol validity should be based on an empirical check rather than on theory-based assurances.     

Perceived informativeness of verbal information

When people are asked to rate verbal material (texts, statements, and statements forming part of a text) according to informativeness, their judgments will to a large extent depend upon how much they already know about the subject, and how novel the communication is to them. This will in some cases make them stress novelty and in other cases familiarity as the most important determinants for expected or perceived informativeness. It is argued that these apparently contradictory trends are reconcilable by a propositional (subject-predicate) model of information, which presupposes an identifiablesubject of the communication (“what it is all about”), as well as something to be predicated about this subject, topic, or theme. This kind of information structure allows the communication to contain both novel and familiar elements at the same time, with informativeness being at a peak when something quite new and unexpected is told about a familiar subject, or when a new subject is made familiar (i.e., satisfactorily explained) to the person. This article was written when the author was on sabbatical leave at the University of Leicester. The study was supported by a grant from the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities.     

Selection of verbal probabilities: A solution for some problems of verbal probability expression

A method for verbal expression of degree of uncertainty is described. It requires the subject to select a phrase from a list that spans the full range of probabilities. In a second, optional, step, the subject indicates the numerical meaning of each phrase. The method avoids two problems of verbal probabilities—the indefinitely large lexicon and the individual differences in the interpretation of words. To test whether context and ordinal position might bias subjects' selection or interpretation of the verbal expressions in the list, the list order was varied. When the verbal expressions were arranged in random order, ordinal position had a significant effect on the selection of expressions. However, these effects did not occur when the phrases were listed in ascending or descending order. Considerations of accuracy and interpersonal agreement also support the use of ordered phrase lists.