Jack Michael’s Musings on the 60th Anniversary of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior

Jack Michael wrote a short essay. He marked 60 years since Skinner's book Verbal Behavior came out.

He told stories about the book's impact on behavior analysts. He did not run an experiment.

Michael says the 1957 book still guides how we teach language. The verbal operants give us a clear map.

He urges every BCBA to read or reread the original text. The ideas stay useful today.

Baer et al. (1984) counted citations. They found most papers only mention Skinner; few test the ideas. Michael's essay asks us to move from citing to doing.

Bao et al. (2017) later showed the field is now testing more. Empirical studies on mands and intraverbals in autism have grown since 2001.

Murphy et al. (2005) give one example. They taught kids with autism to mand for new items without direct training. This extends Skinner's framework into derived relations.

Shillingsburg et al. (2009) add caution. They showed yes/no must be taught in each verbal operant. Kids did not jump from mand yes/no to tact yes/no. The operants stay separate.

Michael's piece is a quick reminder: go back to the source. When you open Skinner's book you get a clean set of labels for what your client is doing. Pair that with modern tools like the SCoRE metric from Mason et al. (2019) and you can track progress in each operant. Use the old framework plus new data to build stronger verbal behavior programs.