Separate but Interlocking Accounts of the Behavior of Both Speaker and Listener: When the Listener Speaks Is There More to Listening Then Just Listening?.

The very fact that behavior analysts have so carefully analyzed the speaker in terms of maintaining variables, but disregard the listener's behavior as broadly "receptive" unless the listener vocalizes (then applying the operants of the speaker until the listener, stops vocalizing) seems to be missing the point of Skinner's original analysis in the first place. This paper seeks to point out the need for greater research and development in the area of listener responding, including when the listener vocalizes and take the current analysis of verbal behavior beyond the broad category of "receptive" behavior to a place where we can scientifically separate the many non-vocative and vocative responses of the listener allowing behavior analysts to have a greater ability to accurately analyze the total verbal discourse. INTRODUCTION "Our interest in the listener is not; however, merely an interest in what happens to the verbal stimuli created by the speaker. In a complete account of a verbal episode we need to show that the behavior of the listener does in fact provide the conditions we have assumed in explaining the behavior of the speaker. We need separate but interlocking accounts of the behaviors of both speaker and listener if our explanation of verbal behavior is to be complete. In explaining the behavior of the speaker we assume a listener who will reinforce his behavior in certain ways. In accounting for the behavior of the listener we assume a speaker whose behavior bears a certain relation to environmental conditions. The interchanges between them must explain all the conditions thus assumed. The account of the whole episode is then complete. (Skinner, p.34, 1957)" Skinner (1957) notes that we must examine both the speaker and listener for two separate yet interlocking accounts of the behavior produced in the exchanges between them. In his treatment of verbal behavior he asserts that one cannot properly elucidate the functions for the responding of speaker without taking into account the responding of the listener and the ecological contingencies in which the behavior is emitted. In Skinner's text he further attempts to delineate verbal behavior in such a way as too remove the need for mentalistic terms such as intention and meaning to explain the "cause" of verbal behavior. What he left us with is a framework upon which behavior analysts can begin to discover more about the various operants at work in verbal behavior without explaining "why" it occurs, but instead how it comes about. "A child acquires verbal behavior when relatively unpatterned vocalizations, selectively reinforced, gradually assume forms which produce appropriate consequences in a given verbal community. In formulating this process we do not need to mention stimuli occurring prior to the behavior to be reinforced. It is difficult, if not impossible, to discover stimuli which evoke specific vocal responses in the young child. There is no stimulus which makes a child say B or A or E, as one may make him salivate by placing a lemon drop in his mouth. (Skinner, p.31, 1957)" Practitioners, who are involved in curriculum development for children of specialty populations, are increasingly becoming aware that training curriculums need to foster a child's growth and development past basic commenting and requesting. This article explores the area of complex verbal operant such as the building of autoclitic frames, self-generation of rules, self-editing and the corresponding development of listener behavior. It is hoped that the curriculums suggested by these comprehensive theoretical components begin to undergo field testing, efficacy, and effectiveness research, and finally find there way into curriculums for children with speech and language delays, developmental disabilities, children with attention difficulty, and oppositional behavior. BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS AND THE SPEAKER Skinner (1957) laid out a functional model of speaker behavior. …