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| Topics in Verbal Behavior: Intraverbals |
| Tuesday, November 14, 2017 |
| 2:00 PM–2:50 PM |
| Forum EF, Niveau 1 |
| Area: VRB |
| Instruction Level: Advanced |
| Chair: Timothy Michael Yeager (Fresno State) |
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| CANCELED: Poetics: A Behavioral Analysis of Creative Writing |
| Domain: Theory |
| M. N. HEGDE (California State University, Fresno (Emeritus)) |
| Abstract: Historically, poetics, the study of literary creativity, is philosophical in nature. Within psychology, poetics is largely mentalistic. Psychoanalysis of creative writing is popular among literary critics and thinkers. This presentation will begin with a brief review and critical evaluation of some major theories of creative writing, including those of Plato, Aristotle, and some contemporary psychologists. That writing literary fiction, poetry, and short stories is a form of verbal behavior, subjected to laws of behavior is not well appreciated. Skinner's analysis of creative writing needs to be extended and the current poetic concepts and theories should be evaluated and reinterpreted in terms of contingencies of behavior and concepts of verbal behavior. This presentation makes a behavioral analysis of an array of statements made by critically acclaimed writers of fiction on how and why they write. The analysis supports the claim that creative writing is a form of verbal behavior under the control of verbal and nonverbal stimuli and learned and sustained by contingencies of reinforcement. Writers's own statements support the claim that verbal and nonverbal events stimulate creative writing in the first place, but once started, intraverbal control sustains writing. The reader's response to literary writing is largely a matter of intraverbal generalization that explains such mentalistic notions as suggested or implied meaning of fiction and poetry. In essence, the analysis tries to show that creative writing is under external control and that such mentalistic notions as inspiration, genius, unconscious forces, brilliance, innate abilities and so forth are unproven as well as unnecessary. The analysis aims to show that writers are a locus where variables that cause writing come together to produce a special effect. |
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| An Analysis of Incidental Language Acquisition and the Relation Between the Emergence of Novel Intraverbals and Conditioned Seeing |
| Domain: Applied Research |
| TIMOTHY MICHAEL YEAGER (Fresno State), R. Douglas Greer (Columbia University Teachers College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences) |
| Abstract: Naming has been identified as a Verbal Behavior Developmental Capability allowing individuals to acquire language incidentally. However, a name is but an arbitrary relation given to a set of essential stimulus characteristics. While many studies have demonstrated the emergence of untaught listener responses, tacts and impure tacts as a function of contrived experiences, few if any have looked at the emergence of untaught intraverbals as a measure of incidental language acquistion. The initial two experiments used a delayed multiple probe design to conduct analysis on the relationship between naming experiences and the emergence of untaught listener, tact, and intraverbals. In each of the experiments, 12 participants, identified as neuro typical, ages 4-5 were used. In Experiment 1, upon the emergence of an untaught accurate tact, all participants emitted the correlated untaught intraverbal, identifying the color of the stimulus when the stimulus was not present. In Experiment 2, additional stimuli characteristics were controlled for and the same relation between untaught tact and intraverbals, as identified in Experiment 1, was observed. In Experiment 3 language acquisition was measured utilizing a non-concurrent stimulus presentation in which the auditory stimulus was presented after the visual stimulus was removed and two distractor trials presented. Through a delayed multiple probe design, results for all six participants, demonstrated a multiple exemplar intervention was successful in establishing language acquisition in the absence of the visual stimulus. As we seek to discover key and necessary sources of language expansion, the acquisition of novel intraverbals may be an important piece. Conditioned seeing may account for these untaught responses as the procedures used may have required the particpants to emit private supplementary stimuli in order to respond accurantely to novel intraverbals. If more than a name is being acquired, it may be beneficial to separate this Verbal Behavior Developmental Capability from other research on Naming, as Incidental Language Acquisition. |
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