BA400 Unit 9 Verbal Behavior Paper Example

Kevin's First Words, Marcus's Chore List and Three Untaught Matches: A BA400 Unit 9 Verbal Behavior and Emergent Relations Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA400: Foundations of Behavior Analysis

Unit 9 Verbal Behavior and Emergent Relations Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the group home, the residents and every figure are composite and illustrative; the books and article cited are real.

Verbal Behavior as Behavior

Language is changing fast in our house this year, for two residents in very different ways. Kevin, 29, has autism and spoke only a few words when he moved in. This year, with support from a speech therapist and our agency's behavior specialist, he has begun using single words and short phrases. Marcus, 34, reads simple sentences and keeps a written chore list on his door.

Skinner (1957) argued that language could be analyzed as behavior, verbal behavior, shaped and maintained by its effects on a listener. Rather than classifying words by their meaning, he classified verbal responses by the variables that control them. Each class he called a verbal operant. Cooper et al. (2020) summarize the main ones used in practice: mands, tacts, echoics and intraverbals.

Mands and Tacts

A mand is a verbal response controlled by a motivating operation and reinforced by the specific item or action named. When Kevin says "juice" at three in the afternoon, when he has not had a drink since lunch, and receives juice, that is a mand. Its form is controlled by what he wants, and its consequence is getting it.

A tact is a verbal response controlled by a nonverbal stimulus, such as an object or event, and reinforced by generalized social consequences, such as attention or praise. When Kevin sees a dog through the window and says "dog," and staff reply, "Yes, a big dog," that is a tact. The same word can be either operant depending on what controls it. "Juice" said while pointing to a juice box on a television commercial, with no thirst and no request, is a tact.

The same word, juice, was a mand when Kevin wanted a drink and a tact when he saw one on television; the controlling variables, not the word, made the difference.

The distinction mattered for Kevin's program. Staff had at first assumed that teaching him to name items would lead him to ask for them. It did not. He could say "ball" when shown a ball but did not say it when he wanted to play. Teaching mands required arranging situations in which he wanted something and prompting the word then.

Echoics and Intraverbals

An echoic is a verbal response that matches the form of a verbal stimulus, such as Kevin repeating "shoes" after a staff member says it. Echoics were the bridge for many of his new words. An intraverbal is a verbal response controlled by another verbal stimulus without matching it, such as answering "milk" when asked, "What do you put on cereal?" Intraverbals are still difficult for Kevin and are the current focus of his program, practiced through simple fill-in songs he enjoys.

Rule-Governed Behavior

Marcus's chore list illustrates a different idea. Some behavior is shaped directly by its consequences, called contingency-shaped behavior. Other behavior is controlled by verbal descriptions of contingencies, called rules. Marcus's list says, "Make bed. Put dirty clothes in hamper. Wipe sink." He follows it each morning, though no one praises him for each item, and the consequence of a made bed is not immediate. His behavior is controlled by the rule, a verbal stimulus, which he learned to follow through a long history of following instructions. Rule-governed behavior lets people act on consequences that are delayed, small or never directly experienced, which is part of what makes language so powerful.

Stimulus Equivalence

The most surprising development came in Kevin's reading program. Sidman and Tailby (1982) described stimulus equivalence: after a learner is taught some conditional relations among stimuli, for example to match a spoken word to a picture and the picture to a printed word, new relations may emerge without training. These include reflexivity, matching a stimulus to itself; symmetry, reversing a trained relation; and transitivity, combining trained relations. When all of these emerge, the stimuli form an equivalence class.

Kevin was taught two relations for ten common foods: when he heard a word such as "apple," he chose the matching picture from three, and when he saw a picture, he chose the matching printed word. Neither the printed word to the spoken word nor the printed word to the picture was taught directly. On a test, he matched printed words to pictures correctly on most trials, an emergent relation that surprised the whole team. Sidman and Tailby's framework explains why: the spoken word, the picture and the printed word had become members of the same class.

When Rules Fail

Rule-governed behavior has a weakness that Marcus's case also showed. In June, staff added a new line to his list: "Take out recycling on Tuesday." Marcus followed it the first Tuesday, then stopped. When staff asked why, he said the recycling truck had come late the second week and the bin sat full for two days, so "it didn't matter." His experience of the actual contingency, a full bin that no one emptied, overrode the rule. Rules work best when they describe consequences that eventually happen. Staff talked with Marcus about the truck's schedule, and the rule was revised to "Take out recycling Tuesday night; truck comes Wednesday." He has followed it since.

The episode illustrates a point Cooper and colleagues make about rule-governed behavior: rules can bring behavior under control of delayed consequences, but if the described consequences do not occur, behavior may shift back toward control by the contingencies actually experienced.

Why the Names Matter

The terms are not academic labels. Knowing that a mand and a tact are different operants led to a different teaching arrangement for Kevin. Recognizing Marcus's routine as rule-governed explained why it continued without immediate reinforcement and suggested writing new rules for new tasks. And stimulus equivalence made Kevin's reading program more efficient, since teaching two relations produced others for free.

Conclusion

Kevin's mands and tacts, Marcus's chore list and Kevin's untaught matches illustrate three parts of the behavior-analytic account of language. Skinner's verbal operants classify responses by what controls them, rule-governed behavior explains how verbal descriptions can control action, and Sidman and Tailby's stimulus equivalence explains how new relations emerge from trained ones. Each concept changed how the team taught, and each began with a precise name for what staff were seeing.

References

Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., & Heward, W. L. (2020). Applied behavior analysis (3rd ed.). Pearson.

Sidman, M., & Tailby, W. (1982). Conditional discrimination vs. matching to sample: An expansion of the testing paradigm. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 37(1), 5-22. https://doi.org/10.1901/jeab.1982.37-5

Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts.