Deficits in communicating one's wants and needs can have significant and detrimental effects on quality of life. Particularly for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other related disabilities, manding is a pivotal skill that influences long-term prognosis. Mand training is complex and relies on several components to facilitate…

The mand is a type of verbal operant whose response form is under control of a motivating operation (MO). It is the first verbal operant to be acquired, directly benefits the speaker, leads to the development of other behaviors, and may serve to replace problem behavior. Even though the topography of the mand is under the functional control of an…

Past research has shown that response interruption and redirection (RIRD) can effectively decrease automatically reinforced motor behavior (Hagopian & Adelinis, 2001). Ahearn, Clark, MacDonald, and Chung (2007) found that a procedural adaptation of RIRD reduced vocal stereotypy and increased appropriate vocalizations for some children, although…

This study replicated and extended Wright (2006) and Whitehurst, Ironsmith, and Goldfein (1974) by examining whether preschool aged children would increase their use of passive grammatical voice rather than using the more age-appropriate active grammatical construction when the former was modeled by an adult. Results showed that 5 of the 6…

We report 2 experiments that tested the effects of multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) across training sets on the emergence of productive autoclitic frames (suffixes) for 6 preschoolers with and without language-based disabilities. We implemented multiple exemplar tact instruction with subsets of stimuli whose "names" contained the suffix "-er"…

Amid the novel terms and original analyses in Skinner's "Verbal Behavior", the importance of his discussion of multiple control is easily missed, but multiple control of verbal responses is the rule rather than the exception. In this paper we summarize and illustrate Skinner's analysis of multiple control and introduce the terms "convergent…

Few studies have made use of B. F. Skinner's (1957) behavioral analysis of language and precise taxonomy of verbal behavior when describing the controlling variables for the mand relation. Consequently, the motivating operation (MO) has not typically been identified as an independent variable and the nature of a spontaneous mand has been…

The discrimination of the onset of joint control is an important interpretive tool in explaining matching behavior and other complex phenomena, but the difficulty of getting experimental control of all relevant variables stands in the way of a definitive experiment. The studies in the present issue of "The Analysis of Verbal Behavior" illustrate…

Eight- and 9-year-olds (N=56) were studied to determine the degree to which counterconditioning could alter the positive or negative value acquired by a neutral stimulus in a conditioning situation. Dependent measures used to assess the effects of conditioning were found to have no independent effect on subsequent evaluations of the once-neutral…

This article reviews the basics of learning channels and how specification of stimuli can help enhance verbal behavior. This article will define learning channels and the role of the ability matrix in training verbal behavior.

An experiement was conducted to test the hypothesis that interest inventory items would function as reinforcing stimuli in a visual discrimination task. When previously rated liked and disliked items from the Strong Vocational Interest Blank were differentially presented following one of two responses, subjects learned to respond to the stimulus…