In the following paper, two experiments are reported based on the relation between adult approvals as conditioned reinforcers and the number of vocal verbal operants, specifically tacts, mands, wh questions, sequelics, and conversational units emitted by children diagnosed with developmental disabilities. In Experiment I, following an experimental…

The results clearly indicate support for the general hypothesis of differential verbal conditioning effects as a function of the interaction between value related content and the S's personal value orientation. (Author)

The present findings, although not supporting an interactional explanation, support studies that have shown A's to be more verbally facile and active, and to be more sensitive to social cues, than B's. (Author)

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…

Based on an MA thesis submitted to the University of Illinois.

Some 80, white, schizophrenic patients were administered the Taylor Personality Scale of Manifest Anxiety (MAS), the Maudsley Personality Inventory (MPI) and were tested on an operant conditioning task. Hypotheses tested were: (1) effectiveness of social reinforcement (verbal approval) on a verbal conditioning task would be enhanced by subjecting…

The present study attempted to duplicate earlier findings and to investigate the effects of mechanical as well as personal reinforcement. However, the acquisition and extinction differences between oral and anal scoring types reported in the earlier studies were not obtained with either personal or mechanical reinforcement. (Author)

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 presents a detailed counseling strategy based on the principles of verbal operant conditioning. It argues that such a strategy should be effective for working with vocational rehabilitation clients whose main complaint is that they are unable to make vocational decisions. (Author)

A major concern of this report was to compare the effect of three verbal reinforcement combinations (VRCs) on the rate at which children learn a simultaneous two-choice discrimination problem. The experiments were designed to test the following: (1) whether relative effectiveness of the VRCs was dependent upon task complexity or subject age; (2)…

The purpose of the current investigation was to quantify the quality of various verbal items on a college population that was voluntarily involved in remedial training in the basic academic skills. (Author)

Explores role of ambiguity in producing verbal conditioning by using two E types and two S types. Six college students were assigned to "crafty Es. Results revealed that certain types of ambiguity increase verbal compliance. (Author)

The influence of spatial features of the counseling environment on conditioning of self-reference statements was examined in two studies conducted at disparate geographical locations. The variable of room size was found to be the most significant variable in both studies. Smaller rooms tended to inhibit the conditioning process. (Author)