Autoclitics are secondary verbal operants that are controlled by a feature of the conditions that occasion or evoke a primary verbal operant such as a tact or mand. Qualifying autoclitics extend, negate, or assert a speaker's primary verbal response and modify the intensity or direction of the listener's behavior. Howard and Rice (1988)…

The production of verbal operants not previously taught is an important aspect of language productivity. For Skinner, new mands, tacts, and autoclitics result from the recombination of verbal operants. The relation between these mands, tacts, and autoclitics is what linguists call "analogy," a grammatical pattern that serves as a foundation on…

The conceptual basis for many effective language-training programs are based on Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior. Skinner described several elementary verbal operants including mands, tacts, intraverbals, and echoics. According to Skinner, responses that are the same topography may actually be functionally independent. Previous…

Five experiments were conducted to determine whether properties inherent in some training procedures may subtly influence the adaptability of skilled performance of complex tasks. The first two experiments assessed the insensitivity of low-rate performances. Examined in the third experiment was the issue of whether instructions that focus…