henry d. schlinger - california state university, los …...listening is behaving verbally henry d....

Listening Is Behaving Verbally

Henry D. Schlinger

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, itmay be important to reconsider the role of the listener in the verbal episode. Although bySkinner’s own admission, Verbal Behavior was primarily about the behavior of the speaker, hisdefinition of verbal behavior as ‘‘behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons’’(1957, p. 2) focused on the behavior of the listener. But because many of the behaviors of thelistener are fundamentally no different than other discriminated operants, they may notappropriately be termed listening. Even Skinner noted that the behavior of the listener often goesbeyond simply mediating consequences for the speaker’s behavior, implying that the listenerengages in a repertoire of behaviors that is itself verbal. In the present article I suggest thatlistening involves subvocal verbal behavior. I then describe some of the forms and functions ofthe listener’s verbal behavior (including echoic and intraverbal behavior) and conclude thatthere may be no functional distinction between speaking and listening.

Key words: listening, rule-governed behavior, speaking, subvocal behavior, Verbal Behavior,verbal behavior

2007 witnessed the 50th anniversa-ry of the publication of VerbalBehavior by B. F. Skinner, a bookthat he considered his most impor-tant work (Skinner, 1977). Contraryto claims of its demise, along with thedemise of behaviorism, Verbal Be-havior has recently made somewhatof a comeback, selling at a brisk paceover the last several years. Part of thereason may be because the interpre-tation presented in the book hasyielded important dividends in theapplied arena, in particular withindividuals diagnosed with autism(Schlinger, 2008c). Not coincidental-ly, there has been a concurrent, albeitslow, increase in the number ofresearch articles, mostly on teachingbasic verbal operants (Dymond,O’Hora, Whelan, & O’Donovan,2006; Sautter & LeBlanc, 2006).

However, most of the applicationsand research reports have focused onspeaking. There has been scant men-tion of listening, perhaps because ofthe perception that Verbal Behaviorwas all about the speaker (but seeHorne & Lowe, 1996; Miguel, Pet-ursdottir, Carr, & Michael, 2008).

Despite Skinner’s own admissionthat Verbal Behavior dealt primarilywith the behavior of the speaker, hedidn’t neglect the behavior of thelistener. In fact, the listener plays acrucial role in the development andmaintenance of the speaker’s behav-ior, as evidenced by Skinner’s defini-tion of verbal behavior as ‘‘behaviorreinforced through the mediation ofother persons’’ (1957, p. 2). Skinnernoted, however, that the behavior ofthe listener often goes beyond simplymediating consequences for thespeaker’s behavior, implying thatthe listener engages in a repertoireof behavior that is itself verbal. Butwhat does the listener actually do andwhy? In this article, I suggest thatwhat we most often speak of aslistening involves subvocal verbalbehavior. I then describe some possi-ble forms and functions of listening(including echoic and intraverbalbehavior) and conclude that thatthere may be no functional distinc-tion between speaking and listening.

Portions of this article were taken fromSchlinger (2008a). I am extremely grateful toEd Morris for his helpful comments andsuggestions, to Mike Dougher, Caio Miguel,Bill Potter, and Mark Sundberg for theirvaluable input, and to Dave Palmer for manylengthy discussions during which some of theideas for this article were conceived.

Correspondence can be addressed to theauthor at the Department of Psychology,California State University, Los Angeles,5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles,California 90032 (e-mail: [email protected]).

The Behavior Analyst 2008, 31, 145–161 No. 2 (Fall)

145

THE DEFINITION OFVERBAL BEHAVIOR

The hallmark of Skinner’s (1957)book was his insistence that verbalbehavior is fundamentally no differ-ent than nonverbal behavior; that is,it comprises forms of operant behav-ior under various types of stimulusand motivational control. For exam-ple, the mand is controlled by moti-vational operations (MOs), the tact iscontrolled by discriminative stimuli(SDs) in the form of objects andevents, other forms of verbal behav-ior (e.g., echoic, intraverbal, textual,and autoclitic behavior) are con-trolled by SDs in the form of priorverbal stimuli, and, of course, allverbal behavior is under the discrim-inative control of an audience com-posed of listeners, including thespeaker. Some behavior analysts(e.g., Hayes, 1994; Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001) have criti-cized Skinner’s general definition ofverbal behavior as not being func-tional because it is based on thesource of reinforcement for thespeaker’s behavior (i.e., other per-sons) rather than the behavior itself(Leigland, 1997). The implication isthat Skinner’s definition doesn’t ap-propriately distinguish verbal fromnonverbal or typical social behavior(Parrott, 1986), despite Skinner’srefinement to include the ‘‘provisionthat the ‘listener’ must be respondingin ways which have been conditionedprecisely in order to reinforce thebehavior of the speaker’’ (1957,p. 225). Chase and Danforth (1991)added a further refinement—‘‘theexplicit conditioning of the listenerinvolves conditioning to arbitrarystimulus relations … such as thosefound in relational classes’’ (p.206)—that Skinner would probablynot have objected to.1 Others (e.g.,Hayes et al., 2001) have offered

different definitions of verbal, but asLeigland points out, any definition isprovisional. From a functional ana-lytic perspective, then, verbal behav-ior is what the behavior-analyticcommunity ends up calling it; thatis, there are no essential qualities ofbeing verbal.

Defenders of Skinner’s definitionand conceptualization of verbal be-havior, however, think that he got itjust right:

According to Skinner, it is not a special typeof behavior, nor does it obey qualitativelydifferent rules. Rather, the special property ofverbal behavior is its power, and it is powerfulonly insofar as it affects the conditionedbehavior of other people in systematic ways.It is not a different type of behavior, but it hasspecial characteristic effects, and it is theseeffects that define ‘‘the domain of interest.’’The characteristic effects depend on thepresence of a verbal community whose mem-bers have all acquired a standard repertoirewith respect to verbal stimuli. Skinner’sdefinition was a way of operationalizing inbehavioral terms the manipulation and inter-pretation of symbols. As with so many otherthings, he seems to have gotten it just right.(Palmer, 2004, p. 202)

Behavior analysts and non-behavioranalysts alike have criticized Skin-ner’s definition and interpretation of

1 Skinner would probably not have objectedto this addition, because he actually intro-duced the concept of relational framing andsuggested the role of a history of multiple

exemplar training when he wrote, ‘‘Somethingless than full-fledged relational autocliticbehavior is involved when partially condi-tioned autoclitic ‘‘frames’’ combine withresponses appropriate to a specific situation.Having responded to many pairs of objectswith behavior such as the hat and the shoe andthe gun and the hat, the speaker may make theresponse the boy and the bicycle on a noveloccasion. If he has acquired a series ofresponses such as the boy’s gun, the boy’sshoe, and the boy’s hat, we may suppose thatthe partial frame the boy’s—is available forrecombination with other responses. The firsttime the boy acquires a bicycle, the speakercan compose a new unit the boy’s bicycle. Thisis not simply the emission of two responsesseparately acquired. … The relational [italicsadded] aspects of the situation strengthen aframe, [italics added] and specific features ofthe situation strengthen the responses fittedinto it’’ (1957, p. 336). This does not mean,however, that Skinner would have suggestedthat such relational behavior is not mediatedby other verbal behavior on the part of thespeaker.

146 HENRY D. SCHLINGER

verbal behavior as not truly getting atthe uniqueness of language. In par-ticular, as already mentioned, somebehavior analysts believe that thedefinition does not distinguish ver-bal from nonverbal behavior.2 Iron-ically, however, Skinner’s uniquecontribution to the study of languageas verbal behavior was that it is notfundamentally different from otheroperant behavior. For Skinner, thesame principles that parsimoniouslyaccount for nonverbal behavior alsoaccount for verbal behavior. Explain-ing the myriad forms verbal behaviortakes, then, means discovering thecontingencies in the verbal commu-nity responsible for those forms.Skinner’s treatment was not an ex-perimental analysis but rather anexercise in interpretation, like manyothers in the history of science. Theonly question for Skinner was wheth-er the interpretation was adequate(Skinner, 1987).

THE LISTENER

According to Skinner (1957), ver-bal behavior is operant behaviorunder various sorts of stimulus (andmotivational) control. The difference,if any, from nonverbal behavior isthat verbal behavior acts indirectlyon the environment ‘‘from which theultimate consequences [of the behav-ior] … emerge’’ (p. 1). He stated thata special treatment was justifiedbecause such behavior ‘‘has so manydistinguishing dynamic and topo-graphical properties’’ (p. 2). Al-though the main thrust of VerbalBehavior was on the behavior of thespeaker, it would be inaccurate to

claim that Skinner neglected thelistener. In fact, he made frequentmention of the listener throughoutthe book. For example, if sheernumber of words is any indicationof the importance Skinner placed onthe listener, the word listener occurs793 times compared to 893 instancesof the word speaker.

Skinner acknowledged that, bydefinition, verbal behavior seems toomit the behavior of the listener. Hejustified this omission by pointing outthat although listeners have acquired‘‘special responses to the patterns ofenergy generated by speakers’’ (1957,p. 2), the behavior of the listener inmediating the consequences of thespeaker’s behavior is not verbal inany special sense. However, thisraises the question of just what itmeans to call some instance ofbehavior verbal. At the beginning ofVerbal Behavior, Skinner seemed tominimize the actions of the listener,as for example, when he wrote, ‘‘anadequate account of verbal behaviorneed cover only as much of thebehavior of the listener as is neededto explain the behavior of the speak-er’’ (p. 2). Just a few pages later,however, he suggested that the be-havior of the listener was morecomplex and needed to be consideredmore fully:

Once a repertoire of verbal behavior has beenset up, a host of new problems arise from theinteraction of its parts. Verbal behavior isusually the effect of multiple causes. Separatevariables combine to extend their functionalcontrol, and new forms of behavior emergefrom the recombination of old fragments. Allof this has appropriate effects upon thelistener, whose behavior then calls for analy-sis.Still another set of problems arises from thefact, often pointed out, that a speaker isnormally also a listener. He reacts to his ownbehavior in several important ways. Part ofwhat he says is under the control of otherparts of his verbal behavior. We refer to thisinteraction when we say that the speakerqualifies, orders, or elaborates his behavior atthe moment it is produced. The mere emissionof responses is an incomplete characterizationwhen behavior is composed. As anotherconsequence of the fact that the speaker is

2 The history of the study of language byphilosophers, linguists, and psychologists sug-gests that language is special; many linguistsand psychologists still hold a Cartesian view inwhich language as an innate capacity is areflection of a rational human mind, whichmeans that no nonhuman can ever be trulycapable of human language. Skinner’s error,then, according to these scholars, was to missthe uniqueness of human language by treatingit no differently than the bar pressing of a rat.

LISTENING IS BEHAVING VERBALLY 147

also a listener, some of the behavior oflistening resembles the behavior of speaking,particularly when the listener ‘‘understands’’what is said.The speaker and listener within the same skinengage in activities which are traditionallydescribed as ‘‘thinking.’’ The speaker manip-ulates his behavior; he reviews it, and mayreject it or emit it in modified form. The extentto which he does so varies over a wide range,determined in part by the extent to which heserves as his own listener. The skillful speakerlearns to tease out weak behavior and tomanipulate variables that will generate andstrengthen new responses in his repertoire.Such behavior is commonly observed in theverbal practices of literature as well as ofscience and logic. An analysis of theseactivities, together with their effects upon thelistener, leads us in the end to the role ofverbal behavior in the problem of knowledge.(pp. 10–11)

These brief paragraphs are remark-able, in part, because they revealSkinner’s belief that an analysis ofthe speaker qua listener can poten-tially solve such intractable problemsas what it means to understandlanguage as well as how an analysisof verbal behavior can illuminateepistemology.3 More simply, theseparagraphs suggest that the behav-iors of listening and speaking may beinseparable, especially when we saythat the listener listens, pays attentionto, or understands the speaker. Thus,any analysis of speaking also appliesto listening.

In the years since, Skinner seems tohave moved away from listening asverbal behavior. Looking back manyyears later, he wrote,

Most of my book Verbal Behavior (1957) wasabout the speaker. It contained a few dia-

grams showing interactions between speakersand listeners, but little direct discussion oflistening. I could justify that because, exceptwhen the listener was also to some extentspeaking, listening was not verbal in the senseof being ‘‘effective only through the mediationof other persons.’’ … But if listeners areresponsible for the behavior of speakers, weneed to look more closely at what they do.(1989, p. 86)

He then described some of the effectsof the speaker’s behavior on thelistener’s behavior that shape andmaintain the behavior of the speaker,including telling, advising, and direct-ing the listener via rules, all of whichhe had previously described as SDs(Skinner, 1966). Many of these be-haviors, however, seem no differentthan basic discriminated (or motivat-ed) behavior except that the discrim-inative (or motivating) stimuli aregenerated by the speaker’s verbalbehavior. So, for example, when ateacher (speaker) tells a student(listener) to ‘‘sit down’’ and thestudent does so, at one level thebehavior of the student is unremark-able. Instead of telling the student tosit down, the teacher could havesimply reinforced sitting in the pres-ence of a light and then turned thelight on when he wanted the studentto sit. To the extent that warnings,advice, directions, instructions, andrules evoke discriminated or motivat-ed behavior and nothing else, afurther analysis seems unnecessary,and such behavior probably shouldnot warrant the label listening.4

Therefore, we may want to distin-guish any unremarkable discriminat-ed or motivated behavior in thelistener from the behaviors we calllistening. If the distinction is made,

3 Some may consider listening and under-standing to be the same (see Parrott, 1984, andSchoneberger, 1990, 1991, for critiques). EvenSkinner implied they were when he wrote, ‘‘Asanother consequence of the fact that thespeaker is also a listener, some of the behaviorof listening resembles the behavior of speak-ing, particularly when the listener ‘under-stands’ what is said’’ (1977, p. 198). In thepresent article, I am interested in what wespeak of as listening, which, often, I wouldargue, is also what we speak of as understand-ing.

4 It seems highly unlikely that in competentlisteners warnings, advice, directions, instruc-tions, and rules would evoke only simplediscriminated or motivated behavior. Morelikely is that such verbal events evoke compli-ance with the warning, advice, direction,instruction, or rule (and any other nonverbalrespondent and operant behaviors), only ifthey evoke a cascade of verbal behaviors that Iam describing as listening or understanding.


we then need to be cautious aboutusing the term listening for all behav-iors of the listener.

Skinner’s refined definition of ver-bal behavior specified that otherpeople (i.e., listeners) are speciallytrained by the verbal community toreinforce the behavior of speakers as,for example, when a listener pro-vides objects or services following aspeaker’s mand, or when a listenerprovides ‘‘educational’’ reinforce-ment for a speaker’s tact ‘‘primarilybecause it establishes and maintains aparticular form of behavior in thespeaker’’ (Skinner, 1957, p. 84). Al-though these listener behaviors arecrucial for the behavior of the speak-er and, in many ways, probablyaccount for the variety of forms ofthe speaker’s behavior, as Skinnernoted, we should not consider themto be verbal. That does not meanthat these consequent-mediating be-haviors are unimportant or that wedo not need to account for them.Nevertheless, listeners engage in oth-er behaviors that are verbal andwhose elucidation might shed somelight on the structural regularities of agrammar or language (Palmer, 1998).That is the focus of the presentarticle.

WHAT IS LISTENING?

For reasons that may partly haveto do with Skinner’s (1957) emphasison the speaker, behavior analystshave not often considered the verbalbehavior of the listener during thespeech episode (but see Horne &Lowe, 1996; Lowenkron, 1998; Palm-er, 1998; Parrott, 1984). This does notmean that Skinner totally neglectedthe listener. As already mentioned,the word listener occurs 793 times inVerbal Behavior (the word listening,however, occurs only 11 times). Butperhaps in part as a reaction againstlinguists who were largely concernedwith the listener, Skinner’s analysisfocused largely on the behavior of the

speaker. As Skinner (1977) noted,Verbal Behavior

has not been understood by linguists orpsycholinguists … in part because linguistsand psycholinguists are primarily concernedwith the listener—with what words mean tothose who hear them, and with what kinds ofsentences are judged grammatical or ungram-matical. The very concept of communica-tion—whether of ideas, meanings, or infor-mation—emphasizes transmission to alistener. So far as I am concerned, however,very little of the behavior of the listener isworth distinguishing as verbal. (p. 379)

In accounting for the total verbalepisode in all of its myriad concate-nations, we must consider that thelistener does more than simply pro-vide an audience for, reinforce, orrespond to the speaker’s verbal be-havior in nonverbal ways. (For a briefdiscussion of some of the roles of thelistener in a behavioral account ofverbal behavior, see Sundberg, 2007,p. 533.) In other words, the listeneralso behaves verbally when he or sheis said to be listening. Because muchof listening is covert, it is easy tobelieve that the listener really doespassively receive and process informa-tion from the speaker. In a behavioralaccount, however, a listener is not thepassive receptacle implied by suchexpressions as receptive language; alistener is constantly active, behavingverbally with respect to other speak-ers as well as to him- or herself as aspeaker. This is especially apparentwhen we consider that as individualsbecome speakers they simultaneouslybecome listeners to both others and tothemselves. As Skinner pointed out,the speaker and listener reside in thesame skin. This fact of verbal behav-ior means that, in this regard, distin-guishing between speaking and listen-ing may be specious.

Because the behaviors involved inlistening are typically automatic andcovert, it is almost impossible to domore than guess about their nature.But there is some evidence to supportour guesses. For example, if someonegives you directions to a destination,


and you do not write them down butmanage to successfully arrive at thedestination, we can (and should) askwhat you did while the directionswere being given (and then againwhile you were driving). It is not veryhelpful to say that the informationcontained in the directions is decodedand mapped onto a stored mentallexicon of meaning, as cognitivepsychologists might describe it. Suchan account is less than parsimoniousbecause we must assume the indepen-dent existence of the inferred struc-tures (a mental lexicon) and processes(storage and decoding) used to de-scribe or explain the phenomenon.Moreover, such an account can neverbe directly tested.

A behavioral approach assumesthat hearing the directions evokes acascade of discriminated verbal be-haviors (in both the listener andspeaker as listener) that themselveshave different functions. But beforewe ask about the function of behavior,we first need to know what behaviorwe are asking about. For presentpurposes, then, our question is: Whatis someone doing when he or she issaid to be listening? The simplestanswer is that the individual is engag-ing in subvocal verbal behavior. (Ofcourse, the listener may also engage inother covert discriminated behaviorssuch as ‘‘seeing’’ or ‘‘hearing,’’ buteven if we want to include them aslistening, a discussion of their role isbeyond the scope of this article.)

Listening as Subvocal Behavior

Skinner (1957) stated that we donot need to guess ‘‘about the muscu-lar or neural substratum of verbalevents’’ (p. 435), noting that it is thejob of behavioral scientists to accountfor the probability of covert respond-ing in the same way they wouldaccount for the probability of overtresponding. He did, however, ac-knowledge that physiological pro-cesses mediate both overt and covertresponses, although he maintained

throughout his career that we cantalk about (i.e., analyze) all responseswithout identifying their physiologi-cal mediators. Nevertheless, identify-ing the physiological structures andprocesses that might mediate behav-ior, especially covert behavior, hasseveral advantages. First, such anapproach may help to dispel anysuggestions about cognitive eventsand, as Skinner (1957) noted, focuson behavior as the primary datum.And, second, interpreting behavioraccording to more than one indepen-dent science (i.e., behavior analysisand neuroscience) strengthens theinterpretation (Donahoe & Palmer,1994). It is in this vein that I discusslistening as subvocal verbal behavior.

Historically, subvocal speech hadbeen discussed mainly in the contextof its relationship to thinking; and itsrole in thinking has had a long andcontroversial history. But accordingto Baars (2001), that controversycame to an end in 1993 whenresearchers, using positron emissiontomography, published a study thatshowed selective activation in lan-guage regions of the cortex duringsilent speech.5 Baars wrote,

For the first time in history, observers could seedirectly what happened in the cortex whensubjects were asked to speak to themselves.There was no fanfare; very quietly, a hotlydebated, century-long controversy about therole of inner speech in thinking was laid to rest.Psychologists had long argued whether thoughtinvolves subvocalization. Although one couldsimply ask people at random moments duringthe day whether they were silently talking tothemselves (they generally said yes), controver-sy continued for decades, for reasons that wereperhaps not purely scientific. A single brainscan experiment in the 1990s put the matterbeyond dispute. (p. 126)

5As Ed Morris (personal communication,April 10, 2008) pointed out, this study andothers like it didn’t necessarily demonstrateselective activation of Broca’s area duringsilent speech because the researchers couldn’tverify that the subjects were in fact silentlytalking to themselves. All we can say is thatthere was brain activity in language regions ofthe cortex during putative silent or subvocalspeech.


Baars is referring to an experiment byPaulesu, Frith, and Frackowiak(1993) demonstrating (according tothe authors and to Baars) that the so-called subvocal rehearsal system (im-plicated in short-term memory) ismediated by Broca’s area. Since then,numerous brain imaging studies havereplicated and extended these find-ings, suggesting that silent (or inner)speech is more than just speculation.For example, two studies using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation demon-strated that during speech perception(listening) there is an increase inmotor evoked potentials recordedfrom the tongue muscles (Fadiga,Craighero, Buccino, & Rizzolatti,2002) and from the lip muscles(Watkins, Strafella, & Paus, 2002),suggesting that the listener is in asense talking along with the speaker.Using functional magnetic resonanceimaging, several other studies havehinted at the precise brain areasinvolved during auditory comprehen-sion. When subjects listened ‘‘pas-sively’’ to speech sounds or sentences,motor areas involved in speech pro-duction were activated (Schlosser,Aoyagi, Fulbright, Gore, & Mc-Carthy, 1998; Wilson, Saygun, Ser-eno, & Iacoboni, 2004). (If listeningpassively to speech sounds evokessubvocal behavior, then the listener isacting by subvocally speaking, which,by definition, is not passive.) Thesestudies and others like them supportthe motor theory of speech percep-tion, which, in simple terms, holdsthat ‘‘we perceive speech by subvo-cally modeling speech, without pro-ducing any overt articulatory move-ments’’ (Lieberman, 2000, p. 48).6

The findings from brain imagingstudies are important for a behavior

analysis of language for at least tworeasons. First, they support thenotion of behavioral continuity.Behavior analysts assume that be-havior (and stimuli) occurs on acontinuum from public to private.The primary difference is the meth-odological difficulty of observingprivate events. This view of behav-ioral continuity is analogous toDarwin’s view of species continuity.Just as Darwin’s assumption ofspecies continuity flew in the faceof the prevailing religious dogmathat humans were created separatelyfrom all other animals, so too doesthe behavior-analytic view of behav-ioral continuity fly in the face of theassumption that cognitive eventsexist separately from behavior.

The second way in which resultsfrom brain imaging studies are im-portant for a behavior analysis oflanguage is that they support thesuggestion that when someone listensthey are at the very least engaging insubvocal behavior. And this is im-portant because it lends support tothe contention that listening is be-having verbally.

FORMS OF LISTENING

I previously suggested that verbalstimuli evoke a cascade of discrimi-nated verbal behaviors in the listener.Accepting that those behaviors con-sist of, but may not be limited to,subvocal responses mediated byspeech production and motor regionsof the brain, we can now considerwhat types of verbal operants mightbe involved. Consider what you dowhen you are said to listen tosomeone. To answer, it might beeasier to consider what you do whenyou do not listen to someone, for

6Brain imaging studies have also demon-strated that speech production and motorareas of the cortex are activated during musicperception (e.g., Lahav, Saltzman, & Schlaug,2007), suggesting that what we do when welisten to music is sing or hum along (eitherovertly or covertly) (Halpern & Zatorre,1999), leading some researchers to comment

that this ‘‘makes sense for melodies, in whichcase we can subvocalize the tune as part of theprocess of retrieving the information’’ (Kos-slyn, Gannis, & Thompson, 2001, p. 637).Moreover, such studies also suggest thatspeech production and motor areas of thecortex are involved in auditory imagery (e.g.,Reisberg, 1992).


example, during a boring lecture.7

When you are not listening to some-one, you are most likely talking (andimagining) to yourself (covertly)about something completely differ-ent. We call this daydreaming. So, iftalking to yourself about somethingcompletely different interferes withyour ability to listen to a speaker, itseems reasonable to suggest thatwhat you do when listening tosomeone is talk to yourself (covertly)about what the speaker is talkingabout. Such self-talk may have sev-eral possible functions.

Echoic Behavior

One form of verbal behavior that isprobably important in listening isechoic behavior. When we are saidto listen or pay attention, it is likelythat we covertly echo what we hear.Many people to whom I have madethis assertion claim that they do notecho when they are listening, towhich I reply that they are simplyunable to detect that they are engag-ing in echoic behavior because it is sorapid, seamless, and subtle (i.e.,subvocal). And yet it seems as if weecho at least in situations in which welearn new information. So, for exam-ple, if you meet someone for the firsttime who introduces himself as ‘‘Ed,’’and then later when asked if you metanyone that day and you answer‘‘Ed,’’ we can infer that at the very

least you echoed his name when hesaid it. How else would you be able toanswer ‘‘Ed’’ to the question if youdidn’t respond verbally in some wayat the time? In fact, we are often toldthat to remember someone’s namewhom we have just met we mustrepeat it either out loud or toourselves. In essence, echoing thename has transformed the verbalstimulus into a verbal response(Palmer, 2007). The assumption thatechoic behavior is involved in whatwe refer to as listening is supported,in part, by research and theories incognitive psychology and neurosci-ence.

The most popular model of work-ing memory is that there is a phono-logical loop that includes both aphonological store for the storage ofphonological information and a re-hearsal process, the function of whichis to keep decaying representations inthe phonological store (Baddeley,Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998). Ac-cording to Baddeley et al., the mostimportant function of the phonolog-ical loop ‘‘is not to remember familiarwords, but to … generate a longerlasting representation of a brief andnovel speech event—a new word’’(p. 158). Thus, the phonological loopseems to be the cognitive equivalentof echoic behavior in a behavioralaccount. I have already describedhow, using positron emission tomog-raphy, Paulesu et al. (1993) claimedthat the phonological loop mayinvolve subvocal behavior, suggestingthat such behavior might be thecritical component of short-termmemory, in particular, the phonolog-ical (or articulatory) loop. Eventhough the verbal material in thePaulesu et al. study consisted ofvisually presented letters, the re-searchers noted that the letters were‘‘transformed into a phonologicalcode … through the subvocal re-hearsal system’’ (p. 342). In moreparsimonious terms, seeing the lettersevoked subvocal textual behavior just

7 We can use the same scenario to talkabout being conscious or aware of someongoing event or of one’s self (Schlinger,2008b), as well as verbal remembering. Thus,if someone tells you that B. F. Skinner wrote abook called Verbal Behavior and later you areable to answer ‘‘Verbal Behavior’’ to thequestion ‘‘What was the title of the bookwritten by B. F. Skinner?’’ or ‘‘B. F. Skinner’’to the question, ‘‘Who wrote the book VerbalBehavior?’’ we can say that you must havelistened or paid attention to (or understood)the original statement, that you rememberedwhat was said, and that you are conscious oraware of who wrote what book. Thus, whatwe normally call listening, understanding,awareness, and verbal remembering may in-volve the same behaviors.


as hearing words often evokes sub-vocal echoic behavior.

Joint Control

Echoic behavior is also involvedwhen joint control is said to occur(Lowenkron, 1998). In its simplestform, joint control occurs when oneverbal topography is evoked jointlyby two sources of stimulus control.For example, suppose a very youngchild who has never been taught topoint to a red square is instructed topoint to the red square from amongan array of colored shapes. Accord-ing to a joint control account, thechild echoes the instruction ‘‘redsquare’’ and then continues to self-echo (‘‘red square,’’ ‘‘red square,’’etc.) until he or she sees the redsquare, which immediately evokes theresponse ‘‘red square’’ as a tact. Atthat instant, under the joint controlof ‘‘red square’’ as a self-echoic andthe red square as a tact, the childpoints to the red square. As Low-enkron (1998) noted, this type ofselection response may be considereda descriptive autoclitic because, bypointing, the child is in a sensereporting which colored square ‘‘en-ters into joint control with thetopography currently under self-echoic rehearsal’’ (Lowenkron, 2006,p. 125).

A joint control account, as a formof mediated stimulus selection, has anadvantage over unmediated accountsin that it is independent of theparticular stimuli used (Palmer,2006). In other words, what is im-portant in most selection-based tasksare not the particular stimuli butrather the responses they evoke thatultimately lead to the correct selec-tion response. Numerous studieswith humans (e.g., Eikeseth & Smith,1992; Horne, Lowe, & Randle, 2004;Lowenkron, 1984; Miguel et al., 2008;Parsons, Taylor, & Joyce, 1981;Pilgrim, Jackson, & Galizio, 2000;Randell & Remington, 2006; Wulfert,Dougher, & Greenway, 1991) and

nonhumans (e.g., Cohen, Looney,Brady, & Aucella, 1976; Eckerman,1970; Kojima, 1980; Urcuioli & De-Marse, 1997) using different proce-dures, including matching to samplewith and without interposed delays,suggest that mediated responding canfoster acquisition and retention (i.e.,remembering) of operant behavior.Thus, a joint control account ofselection-based responding, includingmatching to sample, is a parsimoni-ous explanation in that it appeals tothe ongoing verbal behavior of thelistener as a source of stimulus controlover responding. Moreover, it hasimmediate practical applications inlanguage training programs for chil-dren with language deficits (Sidener,2006).

To understand the importance andrelevance of joint control to thebehavior of listening, consider thedifference between Lowenkron’s(1998) concept of joint control anda nonverbal conditional discrimina-tion. Suppose you ask a preverbalchild ‘‘Where’s the book?’’ whereup-on the child immediately beginsscanning the room until he or shesees the book to which he or she thenpoints. This is a form of joint controlthat we call a conditional discrimina-tion in the sense that reinforcement(whether socially mediated or auto-matic) for pointing is conditional on(i.e., jointly controlled by) both thequestion and the sight of the book(pointing to the book in the absenceof the question is unlikely to garnerpraise or much in the way of auto-matic reinforcement). The differencebetween the conditional discrimina-tion and Lowenkron’s concept ofjoint control can be seen in thebehavior of the respective listeners.In the joint control example, thelistener, with already well-establishedechoic and tact repertoires, becomesa speaker first by engaging in echoicand then self-echoic behavior (evokedby the speaker’s request) and thenagain when the red square evokes thetact ‘‘red square’’ while scanning the


colored shapes. When both verbaloperants are evoked at the same time,responses resembling descriptiveautoclitics are strengthened, includ-ing pointing or saying ‘‘I found it.’’ Aconditional discrimination similar tothe above example of asking the childwhere the book is can be establishedin a nonhuman as, for example, whenyou say to your dog, ‘‘get the ball.’’Upon hearing the command, the dogscans the room until it sees the ball,whereupon it runs and picks it upand brings it to you. In this example,your praise or treats are contingenton the behavior of bringing the ballto you, but only given the command.We can safely infer that the dog didnot echo ‘‘ball’’ and then self-echothe word until it saw the ball. I wouldargue that both examples are parsi-moniously explained according tofairly straightforward operant princi-ples. Although we may refer toresponding to the simple conditionaldiscrimination as listener behavior(e.g., Horne & Lowe, 1996), I suggestthat the term listening is more appro-priately applied to the joint controlexample because the listener is en-gaging in echoic (and tacting) behav-ior.8

Why Do We Echo?

Before leaving our discussion ofechoic behavior, we should addressone additional question: Why do weecho? Intuitively, echoic behaviormust produce reinforcing conse-quences, but what? It seems reason-able to suggest that as children we areencouraged by our parents to repeatwhat they say to us as, for example,

when they ask us, ‘‘What did I say?’’or ‘‘What did she say?’’ or ‘‘What didI tell you?’’ and then reinforce correctanswers. Not only that, but asinfants, before exposure to sociallymediated reinforcement for echoingor repeating what others say, we havea history of automatic reinforcementfor producing sounds that matchthose we’ve heard from our phono-logical environment (Schlinger, 1995).For example, once infants’ vocal mus-culature changes such that they canproduce consonantal sounds, theybegin to systematically produce con-sonant–vowel sequences that linguistsrefer to as babbling. The role ofautomatic reinforcement can be in-ferred from the fact that the intonationand segmenting of babbling of hearingbut not nonhearing infants begin tomatch the language of their phono-logical environment (Bates, O’Con-nell, & Shore, 1987). Palmer (1996)refers to this match between one’svocal response and phonological stim-uli from the verbal community asachieving parity. There is reason toexpect that as we mature and areexposed to a wider range of speakers,automatic reinforcement plays an evenmore important role in the acquisitionand maintenance of echoic and otherverbal behavior. But echoic behavioralone is not sufficient to account forthe behavior of listening.

Intraverbal Behavior

I have stated that verbal stimulievoke a cascade of verbal (andnonverbal) behavior in the listener,including echoic behavior. But listen-ing most likely includes more thanechoing. As Palmer (1998) noted,‘‘We do not merely repeat what wehave heard; we use the terms produc-tively, in novel combinations’’ (p. 7).Thus, in addition to echoic behavior,listening probably also includes in-traverbal behavior. In fact, our on-going internal dialogue consists most-ly of intraverbal chains to the degreethat there is no point-to-point corre-

8Joint control is important for anotherreason. Some behavior analysts have not onlycriticized Skinner’s definition of verbal behav-ior, but have claimed that Verbal Behavior wassterile in that it did not generate ‘‘a progressiveresearch program that raised a large set of newand important empirical questions aboutlanguage’’ (Hayes et al., 2001, p. 11). Butjoint control is one such example (Schlinger,2008c), along with the naming account ofHorne and Lowe (1996).


spondence between the responses andthe stimuli that evoke them. To theextent that listening does not precise-ly match (i.e., maintain point-to-point correspondence) the verbalstimuli from a speaker, it is, bydefinition, intraverbal behavior. Inaddition, when listening to someone,some of our echoic responses mayfunction as SDs for intraverbal re-sponses that can both condition newverbal behavior (see below) andevoke other intraverbal responseseither about what the speaker issaying or that have nothing to dowith what the speaker is saying.When the latter occurs, listening tothe speaker ceases (we are said not tobe paying attention anymore), leav-ing us to be our own speaker andlistener.

Intraverbal behavior is probablyalso important in more complexforms of listening, for example, thosethat go by such names as abstraction,inference, comparison, evaluation, ex-trapolation, and so on. However,because these are terms of commonusage and not technical terms, it isimportant to identify the form of anybehaviors that we speak of with thesedescriptors before suggesting anyfunctions they might possess. Ofcourse, the term listening is also acommonly used term, and althoughsome may suggest that behavioranalysts should abandon it for thatreason, doing so might further isolateus from the community of scholarsand researchers who are tacklingsuch complex behavior. I suggest thatmost of the time when these terms areused, an individual is engaged in aself-dialogue consisting of intraverbalchains and frames (see below).

I previously suggested that perhapslistening, as I am using the term, iswhat we usually mean by understand-ing. Skinner (1957) listed a number ofways that a listener can be said tounderstand a speaker. For example,one might be said to understandSkinner’s definition of verbal behav-ior not when one can recite it word

for word but when one can explainwhat the definition means using otherwords, that is, with chains of intra-verbals. The individual might thencompare Skinner’s definition withothers by discussing their similaritiesand differences, evaluate the defini-tion by talking about its pros andcons, abstract common features ofseveral definitions, and infer whethera novel instance of behavior qualifiesas verbal based on extrapolating thedefinition. In all these instances, theindividual’s verbal behavior consistslargely of intraverbal chains. (Al-though I have focused mainly onechoic and intraverbal behavior, Iconcede that listening very likelyincludes other verbal operants incomplex combinations. The point ofthis article, however, is simply tosuggest that listening is behavingverbally.)

Intraverbal behavior, along withechoic behavior, is important inremembering as well. If we want toremember the name of someone wejust met, or as cognitive psycholo-gists would say, to transfer theinformation from short-term tolong-term memory, in addition torepeating (i.e., echoing) the person’sname (called rehearsal), we areencouraged ‘‘to make connectionsor associations between the newinformation and what we alreadyknow and understand … by inte-grating the new data into our exist-ing schemas of stored information’’(Sternberg, 2003, p. 182). Unfortu-nately, such descriptions are entirelymetaphorical and refer to processesthat are not directly testable. Butwhen it comes to suggestions forhow to best remember a person’sname, after repeating the nameseveral times, we are told to use thename in conversation or to try toassociate the name with a famousperson or the person’s physicalcharacteristics. These tips are essen-tially encouragements to create, thatis, to condition, new intraverbalrelations.


CONDITIONING THE BEHAVIOROF THE LISTENER

So far, I have suggested that whatwe typically speak of as listeningconsists of verbal behavior, althoughwe can still use the term listener torefer to the individual who respondsin any way to stimuli generated by aspeaker’s verbal behavior. Specifical-ly, I have proposed that the behaviorsof listening include at the very leastsubvocal echoic and intraverbal re-sponses. But listening is more com-plex than these forms of discriminatedoperants. The listener’s verbal andnonverbal behavior is often changedin a more permanent way by thespeaker’s behavior even when speakerand listener reside within the samebody.

Skinner addressed this effect in asection in chapter 14 of VerbalBehavior (‘‘Composition and Its Ef-fects’’) titled ‘‘Conditioning the Be-havior of the Listener’’:

The listener reacts to the verbal stimulus withconditioned reflexes, usually of an emotionalsort, or by taking action appropriate to agiven state of affairs. The autoclitic ofassertion makes such action more probable.Relational autoclitics, especially when com-bined with assertion to compose predication,have a different and highly important effect.Since it does not involve any immediateactivity on the part of the listener (althoughresponses of the other sorts already notedmay take place concurrently), we detect thechange only in his future behavior. (1957,p. 357)

Here, Skinner points out that notonly can verbal stimuli (e.g., relation-al autoclitics), like nonverbal stimuli,produce immediate conditioned re-flexive or discriminative effects (asconditional stimuli and SDs, respec-tively), they can produce a morecomplex effect that looks like operantand respondent conditioning. Blakelyand I have termed such effectsfunction altering (Schlinger & Blake-ly, 1987, 1994). In essence, relationalautoclitics can produce changes infuture behavioral relations that in-volve the listener. These altered

relations can be operant or respon-dent. For example, in a subsection ofthe aforementioned chapter in VerbalBehavior titled ‘‘The Conditioningof Discriminative Stimuli,’’ Skinner(1957) wrote,

The verbal stimulus ‘‘When I say ‘three,’ go!’’may have no immediate effect classifiable as aresponse, but it changes the subsequentbehavior of the listener with respect to thestimulus ‘‘three.’’ We are … concerned … withthe operant behavior of ‘‘going’’ evoked bythe discriminative stimulus ‘‘three.’’ (pp. 358–359)

In addition to the relatively straight-forward effects of this statement inevoking emotional responses or basicverbal operants (e.g., echoic or in-traverbal responses), the statement‘‘When I say ‘three,’ go!’’ conditionsthe behavior of going to the stimulus‘‘three,’’ much like a direct reinforce-ment history would. From a func-tion-altering perspective, hearing theword ‘‘three’’ evokes going only as afunction of the statement ‘‘When Isay ‘three,’ go!’’ That is, the state-ment momentarily alters the evoca-tive function of the stimulus ‘‘three’’over the listener’s behavior of going.We may or may not want to call‘‘three’’ an SD, because we cannot besure whether it has directly partici-pated in a four-term contingency(with a motivational operation, re-sponse, and reinforcer). Because‘‘three’’ now functions like an SD inthat it evokes the behavior of going,perhaps we can call it an analogueSD (or SDA) (see Alessi, 1992). (Else-where, I have addressed the questionof whether the process of altering theevocative functions of other events byverbal stimuli should be viewed asdirect operant conditioning or as ananalogue of conditioning; Schlinger,2008a.)

Blakely and I adopted Skinner’sterm contingency-specifying stimulusas a formal descriptor of function-altering verbal operations, and al-though we suggested that at least twomembers of a contingency had to be


specified (Blakely & Schlinger, 1987;Schlinger & Blakely, 1987), I laterpointed out that there are probablyno formal requirements for function-altering verbal operations (Schlinger,1993). Others have offered examplesof verbal operations that can producefunction-altering effects and condi-tion the behavior of the listenerwithout specifying contingencies(e.g., Palmer, 2007; Skinner, 1957).For example, Skinner pointed outthat ostensive definition can condi-tion the behavior of the listener as,for example, when in the presence ofa particular kind of guitar, thespeaker states, ‘‘This is a FenderTelecaster.’’ Assuming a listenerwho engages in echoic (and perhapsintraverbal and imaginal) behavior atthe time, the listener’s future behav-ior with respect to Fender Telecastersis altered as evidenced by the fact thatshown one of the guitars, the listenercan tact ‘‘Fender Telecaster,’’ orwhen someone utters ‘‘Telecaster,’’the intraverbal response ‘‘Fender’’ ismomentarily strengthened or viceversa. In addition, if someone asksthe listener to point to the FenderTelecaster, presumably he or she cando so. If it is among an array of otherelectric guitars, especially otherFenders, then the selection responseis most likely controlled jointly by theself-echoic (‘‘Fender Telecaster,’’‘‘Fender Telecaster,’’ etc.) and thetact ‘‘Fender Telecaster’’ when seeingthe Fender Telecaster. Thus, a num-ber of different verbal and nonverbalrelations are altered by the ostensivedefinition. In addition, simply tellingsomeone that ‘‘A Fender Telecaster isa kind of electric guitar’’ conditionsverbal behavior such that the personcan later report that one kind ofelectric guitar is called a FenderTelecaster, or when hearing someoneutter ‘‘Fender Telecaster,’’ he or shecan report that it is an electric guitar.

Palmer (2007) has written thatalmost any salient verbalization canbring about conditioning in a listenerand elsewhere (Palmer, 1998) has

suggested that intraverbal framesare continuously being conditioned,often by only a single example ofsuch a frame. Ostensive definitions inthe form of ‘‘This is a —’’ qualify asan intraverbal frame as do statementssuch as, ‘‘A Fender Telecaster is anelectric guitar’’ (‘‘A — is a —‘‘).Skinner (1957) referred to suchframes as autoclitic frames. Whatthis means is that in verbally sophis-ticated humans, any verbal stimulus,event, or operation can alter thebehavioral functions of other objects,events, or verbal stimuli. In theexample I used earlier, saying thatsomeone’s name is ‘‘Ed’’ alters sever-al behavioral functions for the listen-er with respect to his name. Forexample, the listener can now answer‘‘Ed’’ to the question, ‘‘Who did youmeet today?’’ Or, when given thename ‘‘Ed,’’ the listener can saysomething like, ‘‘Oh, I met a guynamed Ed today.’’ In fact, providingany information in the form of verbalstimuli to someone who is listening(i.e., someone in whom echoic orintraverbal behavior is evoked) canalter the functions of numerousverbal and nonverbal relations.

Listener Behavior at the Time ofVerbal Conditioning

Given that almost any salientverbalization can condition verbalrelations in a competent listener, wecan ask how this happens. Althougha complete account awaits furtherstudy, I suggest that the listener hasto listen as I have used the term inthis article. Consider the intraverbalframe, ‘‘tomatoes are a fruit.’’ If youdo not know already that tomatoesare technically considered a fruit,then the frame probably evokes anechoic response (‘‘tomatoes are afruit’’) and also intraverbal responsessuch as ‘‘orange,’’ ‘‘banana,’’ ‘‘ap-ple,’’ as well as imaginal responses(e.g., ‘‘seeing’’ a tomato, orange, orbanana). By echoing the frame ‘‘to-matoes are a fruit,’’ the verbal


stimulus is converted into a response.As a new response form (but not aframe) in your repertoire, the variableterms in the frame (e.g., ‘‘tomato’’and ‘‘fruit’’) evoke other (eitherechoic or intraverbal) responses. Forexample, at the time the listener maysay to him- or herself, ‘‘Apples arealso a fruit.’’ In the future, whensomeone mentions tomatoes, thelistener may find him- or herselfsaying, ‘‘Did you know that tomatoesare a fruit?’’ For a more extensivediscussion of the role of intraverbalframes, see Palmer (1998).

The point of this brief speculativeanalysis is that appealing to theongoing discriminated verbal behav-ior of the listener represents a parsi-monious approach to explaining howverbal stimuli condition the behaviorof the listener without resorting toanalyses at other levels.

RULES AND RULE-GOVERNED BEHAVIOR

I have suggested that verbal stimuligenerated by speakers frequentlyserve to condition the behavior oflisteners in that they alter the evoca-tive functions of antecedent events.Before concluding, however, I wantto briefly address the implications ofthis thesis for the concept of rule-governed behavior. Although behav-ior analysts have taken various ap-proaches to understanding rules andrule-governed behavior (e.g., Cata-nia, 1989; Cerutti, 1989; Glenn, 1987;Hayes & Hayes, 1989; Skinner, 1969,pp. 133–171), Blakely and I haveargued that if behavior analysts usethe term rule, then it should bereserved for events that do somethingmore than evoke behavior as SDs (orMOs) (see also Vaughan, 1987). Towit, we argued that the term shouldbe used only for verbal stimuli thatare function altering (Blakely &Schlinger, 1987; but see Hayes &Hayes). Thus, a statement such as,‘‘Please pick up your toys,’’ althoughformally an instruction or a request,

would not be considered a rule if itsonly effect was to evoke picking uptoys because such behavior has beenreinforced in the past when theinstruction was given. We couldcondition such behavior to a lightonset in the very same way. Con-versely, saying ‘‘that is delicious’’ inthe presence of a novel food, al-though not formally an instructionor rule, should be considered a ruleif it alters the function of the foodsuch that its presence evokes eatingin the listener. On this view, a rule isany verbal stimulus, irrespectiveof who utters it, that functions tocondition the behavior of the listen-er. Because of the ubiquity of verbalstimuli that condition a listener’sbehavior and the different ap-proaches to rule-governed behav-ior by behavior analysts, we mightwant to consider dispensing with theconcept altogether.

CONCLUSION

In his magnum opus, Verbal Be-havior (1957), B. F. Skinner offered adetailed and thorough interpretationof the behavior of speakers condi-tioned by listeners who are speciallytrained to respond to such behavior.Because listeners also become speak-ers, then it is not far fetched toassume that, by definition, theyengage in verbal behavior when theyare listening. Hayes and Hayes (1989)faulted Skinner for denying that basiclinguistic processes are common toboth speaker and listener. Theyargued that speakers and listenersshare a history of training with‘‘arbitrarily applicable relations sus-tained by social convention’’ (p. 182).Following Skinner’s lead in VerbalBehavior, in the present article I havealso suggested that there are linguisticfeatures common to both speakerand listener, but the commonality isthat both individuals engage in verbalbehavior.

As I previously acknowledged,although listeners engage in numer-


ous behaviors, including mediatingthe verbal behavior of speakers andresponding nonverbally (both oper-antly and respondently), I am sug-gesting that it is only when they arealso speaking (mostly echoically orintraverbally) that they are said to belistening (or paying attention, orunderstanding). In other words, lis-tening is behaving verbally. That thelistener is also a speaker at thesetimes seems to solve the problem ofattempting to identify separate rep-ertoires or characteristics that distin-guish speaking and listening func-tionally. From a behavior-analyticperspective, then, it remains usefulto speak of them separately only withrespect to social custom.

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henry d. schlinger - california state university, los …...listening is behaving verbally henry d....

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