Listening and understanding.
Understanding is covert operant behavior you can shape, not a hidden mind you must guess.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Parrott (1984) wrote a theory paper. No kids. No trials. Just ideas.
The author asked, "What is happening when someone listens and understands?"
He answered with Skinner’s lens: listening is covert operant behavior, not a ghost in the machine.
What they found
Understanding is not a mental picture. It is a set of tiny private responses we learned through past words and things.
These hidden responses are still behavior. They can be shaped, reinforced, and studied like any other action.
How this fits with other research
Donahoe et al. (2000) took the same idea and ran it on a computer. They built neural nets that act like listeners. The 1984 paper gave them the playbook.
Killingsworth et al. (2016) moved the lens to factory floors. They treat "situation awareness" as listener behavior shaped by safety cues. Again, the 1984 logic travels.
Wang et al. (2019) stretched it further. They use the listener model to explain how interpreters share meaning across languages. History, not vocabulary, drives understanding.
Why it matters
Next time a parent says, "My child doesn’t understand," think responses, not mind. Ask what prior pairings the word "clean up" has had. Then build new ones with reinforcement. You can measure understanding by what the body does next, even if the action is silent.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Pick one instruction your learner "ignores." Deliver it, then immediately prompt a visible response and reinforce. Track if the prompt fades across five trials.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The activities involved in mediating reinforcement for a speaker's behavior constitute only one phase of a listener's reaction to verbal stimulation. Other phases include listening and understanding what a speaker has said. It is argued that the relative subtlety of these activities is reason for their careful scrutiny, not their complete neglect. Listening is conceptualized as a functional relation obtaining between the responding of an organism and the stimulating of an object. A current instance of listening is regarded as a point in the evolution of similar instances, whereby one's history of perceptual activity may be regarded as existing in one's current interbehavior. Understanding reactions are similarly analyzed; however, they are considerably more complex than listening reactions due to the preponderance of implicit responding involved in reactions of this type. Implicit responding occurs by way of substitute stimulation, and an analysis of the serviceability of verbal stimuli in this regard is made. Understanding is conceptualized as seeing, hearing, or otherwise reacting to actual things in the presence of their "names" alone. The value of an inferential analysis of listening and understanding is also discussed, with the conclusion that unless some attempt is made to elaborate on the nature and operation of these activities, the more apparent reinforcement mediational activities of a listener are merely asserted without an explanation for their occurrence.
The Behavior analyst, 1984 · doi:10.1007/BF03391883