Analysis of Verbal Behavior最新文献

Language delays are commonly displayed by children on the autism spectrum. To help facilitate the development of verbal behavior, practitioners often implement intensive one-on-one, face-to-face instruction. However, the COVID-19 pandemic hindered typical face-to-face service delivery and caused practitioners to assess alternative approaches to facilitate clients' continued progress. Instructive feedback (IF) is one teaching strategy to enhance instruction or make it more efficient. During this teaching procedure, instructors provide formal teaching of target responses and embed demonstrations of secondary target responses within sequences of instruction. In the current study, we investigated the efficacy of IF provided within telehealth instruction. Four participants on the autism spectrum participated in the study. Participants received two forms of telehealth instruction that targeted speaker-responding. The first form consisted of discrete trial instruction (DTI), and the second form combined DTI with IF. These results indicate that both forms of instruction improved speaker-responding of primary targets for all participants. Additionally, a secondary analysis of secondary targets indicated that two of the four participants acquired some secondary targets. These results suggest that including IF within DTI might be beneficial for some participants receiving DTI via telehealth.

The autoclitic is among the least studied and most complex verbal operant named and described by Skinner. The descriptive autoclitic is one subtype, which among other functions can describe the strength of the response. If the clarity of the stimulus is one source of response strength for tacts, manipulating stimulus clarity should evoke different frequencies of descriptive autoclitics. In an experiment with adults, digitally distorting pictures of common objects predicted the relative frequency of descriptive autoclitics that accompanied tacts. The most distorted images evoked twice as many autoclitics as moderately distorted images, and low-distortion images evoked no autoclitics. We encourage other researchers to interpret Skinner's conceptualization of the autoclitic and its various forms and test them empirically to evaluate how their functional definitions can be clarified, refined, or altered.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40616-023-00184-1.

In topography-based verbal behavior, different antecedent stimuli control different topographies of responding, whereas in selection-based verbal behavior, different antecedent stimuli control the selection of visually distinct stimuli from an array of options. In this article, we point out three variable characteristics of selection-based behavior, highlighted by recent technological developments, that affect its similarity to topography-based behavior: The extent to which stimuli can be constructed from minimal units, the size and composition of the selection array, and the similarity of response-produced stimuli to verbal stimuli that are prevalent in the speaker's verbal community. Although a distinction between topography-based and selection-based behavior has merit, particular characteristics of a selection-based verbal behavior modality may often be more relevant for researchers and clinicians to consider than its status as selection-based.

Although many neurotypical children acquire untaught word-object relations incidentally from naturally occurring environmental experiences, many children with and without developmental disabilities require specific intervention. This study examined the effects of rotating listener (match and point) and speaker (tact and intraverbal-tact) responses with added echoics during multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) with training sets of stimuli on the acquisition of Incidental Bidirectional Naming (Inc-BiN). Listener-speaker MEI procedures reported in Hawkins et al. European Journal of Behavior Analysis, 10(2), 265-273, (2009) were replicated with procedural modification, new instructors, and new participants (four preschoolers with and without disabilities). The listener-speaker MEI with added echoics consisted of rotating across four response operants: match-with-echoics, point-with-echoics, tact, and intraverbal-tact responses. We measured the establishment of Inc-BiN through the number of the correct untaught listener (point) and untaught speaker (intraverbal-tact) responses for untaught stimuli during the listener-speaker MEI with added echoics. We found that listener-speaker MEI with added echoics was effective in establishing Inc-BiN for 3 of 4 participants.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may struggle with verbal behavior related to recall in various contexts. However, relatively little research has evaluated methods for improving recall among this population, and even fewer from a verbal behavior perspective. One socially important set of skills that relies upon a behavioral repertoire of recall is applied reading skills, such as reading comprehension and story recall. Valentino et al. (2015) designed an intervention package to teach children with ASD to recall short stories and conceptualized the behavior as an intraverbal chain. The present study replicated and extended that study with three school-aged children with ASD using a multiple baseline design across stories. For some participants and some stories, story recall was mastered under less intensive intervention conditions than in the previous study. When it was necessary to implement the full intervention package, the effects largely replicated previous research. Improvements in recall were correlated with increases in correct answers to comprehension questions. These data have important implications for clinicians and educators providing reading and recall interventions to children with ASD. Results also have theoretical implications for verbal behavior accounts of memory and recall, and suggest several possible avenues for future research.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40616-023-00183-2.

Published research in scientific journals are critical resources for researchers as primary sources about: what is important in the field, the direction the field is headed, how the field relates to other sciences, and as a historical record for each of these. In this exploratory study, we analyzed the articles of five behavior analytic journals to identify trends in these areas. To do this, we downloaded all available articles (N = 10,405) since the inception of five behavior analytic journals and one control journal. We then used computational techniques to turn the collection of raw text into a structured dataset for descriptive, exploratory analyses. We found consistent differences in the length and variability of published research across behavior analytic journals compared to a control journal. We also found increasing article lengths over time which, combined with the previous finding, may highlight changing editorial contingencies that influence the writing behavior of researchers. Further, we found evidence suggesting distinct (though still connected) verbal communities between the experimental analysis of behavior and applied behavior analysis. Lastly, keyword trends suggest that increased focus on "functional analyses," "problem behavior," and "autism spectrum disorder" currently dominates the research being published in these journals similar to the practitioner arm of behavior analysis. Researchers interested in studying published behavior analytic textual stimuli will find the corresponding open dataset useful. And, for those interested in computational analyses of these data, this first pass at simple descriptions provides a launching point for much fruitful future research.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40616-022-00179-4.

An intraverbal assessment was administered to older adults with aphasia, using a hierarchy of questions that required increasingly complex verbal discriminative stimulus control. Five categories of errors were defined and analyzed for putative stimulus control, with the aim to identify requisite assessment components leading to more efficient and effective treatments. Evocative control over intraverbal error responses was evident throughout the database, as shown by commonalities within four distinct categories of errors; a fifth category, representing a narrow majority of errors, was less clear in terms of functional control over responses. Generally, questions requiring increasingly complex intraverbal stimulus control resulted in weaker verbal performance for those with aphasia. A new 9-point intraverbal assessment model is proposed, based on Skinner's functional analysis of verbal behavior. The study underscores that loss or disruption of a formerly sophisticated language repertoire presents differently than the fledgling language skills and errors of new learners, such as typically developing children and those with autism or developmental disabilities. Thus, we would do well to consider that rehabilitation may require a different approach to intervention than habilitation. We offer several thematic topics for future research in this area.

In simultaneous prompting procedures, an immediate (i.e., 0-s) prompt is presented during all training trials, and transfer to the target discriminative condition is assessed during daily probes. Previous research suggests that simultaneous prompting procedures are efficacious and may produce acquisition in fewer errors to mastery when compared to prompt delay procedures. To date, only a single study on simultaneous prompting has included intraverbal targets. The current study evaluated the efficacy of a simultaneous prompting procedure on the acquisition of intraverbal synonyms for six children at risk for reading failure. Simultaneous prompting alone produced responding at mastery levels in seven of the 12 evaluations. Antecedent-based procedural modifications were effective in four of the five remaining evaluations. Errors were generally low for all but one participant. The current findings support the use of simultaneous prompting procedures when targeting intraverbals for young children exhibiting reading deficits.

The discipline of film studies often engages in analyses of the functions of filmmakers' decisions in terms of their effects on viewers. Behavior analysis uses a similar, functional-analytic approach toward understanding the relationship between individuals' behavior and the environmental effects that maintain their behavior. Given converging similarities between the two disciplines, a functional analysis of filmmaking is provided, using Skinner (1957)'s Verbal Behavior as a guiding framework. Similar to behavioral conceptualizations of language and speaker-listener verbal episodes, the analysis prioritizes functional explanation of the controlling variables and conditions that underlie the meaning of filmmakers' behavior and behavioral products, rather than solely focusing on their topographical description. Viewers' responses to the audiovisual stimuli of the film are emphasized as key controlling variables, through rules specifying contingency relations as well as through contingency shaping, including when the filmmaker acts as a self-viewer who directly shapes their own behavior. Their responding as a self-viewer during the production and editing of a film is explored as a problem-solving process, similar to other artists who serve as their own audience when creating and editing their behavioral products.

Problem-solving strategies, such as visual imagining and self-questioning, may assist children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in recalling past events. In the current study, at the start of each session, a 7-year-old boy with ASD engaged in a novel activity with a behavior therapist who took pictures of the activity. Ninety minutes later, a different therapist asked the participant to describe the prior activity. The intervention consisted of showing the participant pictures of the activity, telling him to close his eyes and imagine the activity, modeling asking and answering seven questions (e.g., "Who was there?" "What was one thing that happened?"), prompt fading, and reinforcement. Following the intervention, recall statements increased.