A controversial issue in anaphoric processing has been whether processing preferences of anaphoric expressions are affected by the antecedent's grammatical role or surface position. Using eye tracking, Experiment 1 examined the comprehension of pronouns during reading, which revealed shorter reading times in the pronoun region and later regions…

This study investigates responses to verbal versus tactile requests in children with congenital blindness, intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Observation was conducted on two occasions. At T1, requests were given verbally, and at T2, tactile requests were given. All pupils perceived tactile symbols to be explicit requests…

The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is an alternative/augmentative communication protocol designed to help children and adults with autism and related disabilities to engage in functional communication. The protocol was developed over a number of years and was based on Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior. Publications about the…

Studies that have compared the effectiveness of differing prompt types to teach intraverbal responses have yielded mixed results, suggesting that individuals' reinforcement histories with prompt types may influence which prompt will be most effective. The purpose of this study was to test whether programmed increases in exposure to specific prompt…

This study investigated the mental representations of metallic bonding and the malleability of metals held by three male students aged 14-15 (Year 10) who were attending a Hong Kong school. One student was selected by their chemistry teacher as representing each of the highest, the medium, and the lowest level of attainment in chemistry in a…

This study examined the contribution of verbal behavior to the creation of rapport in negotiation, while methodologically addressing the issue of dependence between dyadic measures, which is inherent to the concept of rapport, with the Actor-Partner Interdependence model. The approach adopted is substantially different from that of past research,…

Despite its theoretical importance, the effect of past punishment on verbal behavior is often overlooked in research due to the difficulty of measuring it. The present study explores the relationship between physiological arousal in humans and swearing; a behavior likely to have been punished in the typical conditioning history of an individual.…

The crux of Critchfield's (2011) article is that there have not been enough translational contributions, and as a result societal support for basic research in behavior analysis is waning. Critchfield suggests, therefore, that to remain viable as a research enterprise, more attention needs to be paid to the translational (read "immediate…

Stimulus repetition often leads to facilitated processing, resulting in neural decreases (repetition suppression) and faster RTs (repetition priming). Such repetition-related effects have been attributed to the facilitation of repeated cognitive processes and/or the retrieval of previously encoded stimulus-response (S-R) bindings. Although…

In a recent article, Schlinger (2008) marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" (1957) by considering its impact on the field of behaviorism and research on verbal behavior. In the present article, we comment on Schlinger's conclusions regarding the impact of the book and highlight the extensions and…

According to the body-specificity hypothesis, people associate positive things with the side of space that corresponds to their dominant hand and negative things with the side corresponding to their nondominant hand. Our aim was to find out whether this association holds also true for a response time study using linguistic stimuli, and whether…

Words presented to the right visual field (RVF) are recognized more readily than those presented to the left visual field (LVF). Whereas the attentional bias theory proposes an explanation in terms of attentional imbalance between visual fields, the attentional advantage theory assumes that words presented to the RVF are processed automatically…

Language for number is an important case study of the relationship between language and cognition because the mechanisms of non-verbal numerical cognition are well-understood. When the Piraha (an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe who have no exact number words) are tested in non-verbal numerical tasks, they are able to perform one-to-one matching…

Current research on analogy processing assumes that different conceptual relations are treated similarly. However, just as words and concepts are related in distinct ways, different kinds of analogies may employ distinct types of relationships. An important distinction in how words are related is the difference between associative (dog-bone) and…

Proponents of the verbal behavior approach to instruction for individuals with autism have identified mand training as a starting point for early intervention. Mand training is a process whereby the learner is taught to request highly preferred items under conditions when those items are most valuable. A hypothesized benefit of this approach is…