ABSTRACT
WHY DID SKINNER WRITE A WHOLE BOOK ABOUT VERBAL BEHAVIOR? The most distinctly human behavior involves the way in which we communicate. Skinner began analyzing verbal behavior early, but it wasn’t until he began work in education that he fi nished his book-over 20 years later.1 The book Verbal Behavior uses no new principles: reinforcement, punishment, induction and discrimination work the same way for verbal behavior as they do for any other behavior. But postcedents for verbal behavior do not result directly from the actions of the person behaving. Picking up a piece of bread gets the bread, but saying “Bread, please,” may or may not result in getting bread. A “listener” is needed to mediate the consequences of a request. You can learn to walk without help, but there is no way you can learn a language without help from others. Skinner defi nes verbal behavior as behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons.2 How those persons mediate is stated late in the book: Mediators respond “in certain ways because of the practices of the group of which they are members.”3 That is, group members reinforce forms that conform to those of their “language.” Adding a mediator’s behavior into contingencies makes the analysis of verbal behavior a four-term analysis: For this example you have: 1) presence of bread; 2) request; 3) mediator passes; 4) bread received.
