Verbal Behavior Essay -- Analysis, Skinner

Skinner's book â€Å"Verbal Behavior,† first published in 1957, presented his ideas about the influence of language can be used in the framework for behavioral research and analysis. The main argument presented by Skinner was that verbal behavior was different than other forms of behavior and deserved to be separated in a distinctive category, and Skinner considered language development as the result of mediation of other people while nonverbal behavior was enforced through the physical environment. Skinner defined the basic verbal operants in his analysis of verbal behavior, which include the mand, tact, intraverbal, echoic, and the autoclitic operants, and he distinguished the type of consequence for each operant. Furthermore, the theory defines the audience as a discriminative stimulus that will affect language development as it gives the signs of possible rewards or punishment. There was no previous research on the topic, so the lack of data available for writing the book and lack of experiments in the book, and the theory was subject to severe criticism and ignored in the academic community for several decades after it was published (McPherson, Bonem, Green, & Osborne, 1984). Although Skinner's language development theory was not accepted in the academic community or applied frequently in research until the 1990s (Sundberg, & Michael, 2001), Skinner's verbal behavior theory successfully defines verbal operants relevant to the basic behavioral principles. This essay will show that the main implication to the development of this theory is the severe criticism of Skinner's theory as unsound and consisted of plagiarized traditional ideas. Despite the criticism against Skinner's theory, it is questionable if the criticism itself prov... ...tals of language development, applying Skinner's theory could rule out those errors and prove to be successful in its applications. Rather than criticizing Skinner's theory based on the lack of empirical evidence presented in his book, or denying the effectiveness of the theory for several seemingly irrelevant reasons, such as the unclear definition of its correlation to a neurological-genetic theory (MacCorquodale, 1970), empirical research should provide clear evidence on the credibility of Skinner's theory. Although the entire theory does not have to be proven successful, several aspects of Skinner's theory have proven successful in conducting behavioral interventions (Sundberg & Michael, 2001). Recent studies show increased use of Skinner's language development framework, so the criticism against the theory was obviously a major implication to its development.