Association for Behavior Analysis International

Skinner (1938) wrote of his own work that It is a serious mistake to allow questions of ultimate application to influence the development of a systematic of a systematic science at an early stage (p.441). His analysis of verbal behavior (Skinner, 1957) has generated much applied research, but relatively little basic research. This symposium reminds us of the value of asking and answering questions which may not have immediate applied relevance, because they provide information about uniformities in verbal behavior which lead to practical benefit. Topics include studies on the parity hypothesis, grammar and production of novel prepositional sentences, the effects of blocking verbal behavior on joint-controlled sequencing and a direct replication of Skinners verbal summator experiment.

Skinner (1957) hypothesized that ones vocal pattern is automatically reinforced if it is similar to the vocal patterns of preferred individuals which results in borrowing verbal behavior from the community (p. 164). Palmer (1996) describes this process as parity which occurs when a speaker, who is a competent listener, differentially reinforces his/her own vocal verbal behavior to conform to that of the verbal community. The current study replicates and extends stvik, Eikeseth, and Klintwall (2012) by examining if English-speaking undergraduate students would alter their vocal verbal behavior to conform to an experimenters model of tacts in the passive voice in the absence of socially-mediated reinforcement. Undergraduate students were assigned to either the control group, which was never exposed to modeling; the waiting quietly group, which replicated previous procedures; or the vocal imitation group, which extended previous procedures by including echoic tasks during the wait interval. Participants in the control group had consistent grammatical forms of tacts across phases and rarely engaged in vocal verbal behavior with passive voice, whereas the majority of participants assigned to the waiting quietly or vocal imitation groups showed increased use of passive voice following modeling. However, the degree of change differed across participants. Verbal behavior theoretical implications and future directions will be discussed.

The verbal summator was a device created by B. F. Skinner to assess verbal behavior. Skinner's original 1936 verbal summator study was an early attempt to study echoic (originally termed imitative) and intraverbal (originally termed summative) behavior. Extensions of the original study focused on the use of the summator as a diagnostic or assessment tool rather than using it to study the function of verbal behavior. No previous studies have directly replicated Skinner's original experiment. For the current study, researches recorded new samples resembling Skinner's original audio recordings using modern digital recording technology. These samples, like the originals used by Skinner, were arrangements of preverbal sounds that were played slightly distorted at a low volume. During the experimental sessions, we presented random selections of these audio recordings to 30 subjects and asked to report what they heard. The audio samples were repeatedly presented until the subject provided a word or phrase describing what they heard. The resulting data analysis was conducted as described by Skinner (1936). Implications of these results and directions for future research will be identified. Data will be presented on the number of samples, organized by the number of syllables. In addition, data will be presented on the similarity of the collected responses to real speech, as described in Skinner (1936), through the use of Zipf's law analysis. Finally, responses were collected and ranked according to their frequency of occurrence.