RESUMO
When the B. F. Skinner Foundation reprinted Skinner's Verbal Behavior in 1992, Jack Michael wrote one of its two forewords, a detailed outline of the book's purpose and scope. On the 60th anniversary of the first publication (1957) of Verbal Behavior, Jack reflects on the book's impact and its importance to the understanding of language from a behavioral perspective.
RESUMO
"In the late 1950's, Jack Michael, a bright but irritating young psychology instructor, moved from the Universities of Kansas to Houston to Arizona State. Along the way he befriended two nontraditional students, protected them through their Ph.D. programs, and turned them loose on the world: Teodoro Ayllon and Montrose Wolf " (Risley, 2001, p. 267). So begins Risley's chapter on the origins of applied behavior analysis. For almost 50 years, Jack Michael provided a model for us to "talk like Skinner" and to analyze behavior as Skinner would. For this, he has been widely respected and revered. The purpose of this bibliography is to explain to new and familiar readers alike Jack's contributions to the field of behavior analysis in areas of his primary focus: (a) behavioral function taxonomy, (b) motivation, (c) reinforcement, (d) response topographies, (e) multiple control, (f) duplic and codic verbal behavior, and (g) teaching. Throughout, we weave his role in the field's history and his leadership in its expansion, as these have been additional areas of significant contributions. Above all, we wish to highlight Jack's work, in bibliographic and narrative form, in a way that expresses a heartfelt tribute on behalf of his students and others whom he influenced to learn about psychology as a natural science and to think and talk like Skinner.
RESUMO
Eleven typically developing children were assessed on the accuracy of prompted self-echoic responses following a 5-s delay from their initial echoic response, replicating procedures in Esch, Esch, McCart, and Petursdottir (2010) that compared discrepancies between echoic and self-echoic scores of autistic and typically developing children following a 2-s delay. We compared the two studies in terms of age, level tested, and echoic/self-echoic discrepancy scores. Age and test level differences were found to be statistically significant. Results are discussed in terms of discrepant self-echoic performance and self-echoic rehearsal as it relates to participant age, test level, motivating variables, and the development of complex behavior.
RESUMO
In the behavioral literature, self-echoic behavior has been hypothesized to play an important role in, for example, emergent conditional discriminations (e.g., Lowenkron, 1991), emergent verbal operants (Horne & Lowe, 1996), and problem solving (Skinner, 1957). Although early behavioral intervention programs for children with autism emphasize the establishment of accurate echoic repertoires, the type of stimulus control that defines a self-echoic response is typically not addressed. We report the development of a self-echoic assessment procedure that was administered to children with and without autism spectrum disorders. Preliminary results indicated that a discrepancy between echoic and self-echoic repertoires was more likely to be present among participants with autism than among typically developing participants. Future research should evaluate the extent to which interventions to establish self-echoic responding might produce other collateral benefits.
RESUMO
Variability has been demonstrated to be an operant dimension of behavior (Neuringer, 2002; Page & Neuringer, 1985). Recently, lag schedules have been used to demonstrate operant variability of verbal behavior in persons with a diagnosis of autism (e.g., Lee, McComas, & Jawor, 2002). The current study evaluated the effects of a Lag 1 schedule on the vocal variability of 2 nonverbal children with a diagnosis of autism. Results showed systematic increases in variability during the Lag 1 schedule. Implications of lag schedules for speech and language training are discussed.
