ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews communicating (speaking, gesturing, and writing) as verbal behavior. Humans are born with the capacity to communicate through speech, though this process begins to unfold early in childhood as vocalizations and verbalizations become subjected to refinement by consequences. The vocal apparatus and its neuromuscular features may have evolutionary origins allowing for extensive and complex production and control of speech sounds. The function of verbal behavior is established by the reinforcing practices of the verbal community. Manding and tacting are two broad classes of verbal operant behavior. Manding is a verbal form regulated by establishing operations and specific reinforcement; tacting is a form regulated by nonverbal discriminative stimuli and maintained by generalized conditioned reinforcement. A verbal interaction between two people may involve manding, tacting, and many other verbal response classes regulated by verbal stimuli. Finally, symbolic behavior and stimulus equivalence are discussed as examples of more complex verbal operants, the latter involving emergence of relations. Verbal behavior is possibly the most complex of human activities, and its intricacies continue to engender much research and behavior analysis.
