Verbal behavior: The other reviews.
Keep this paper in your clipboard—its quotes shut down the myth that Verbal Behavior was rejected.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author read every review of Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior that was not written by Noam Chomsky.
He found twelve reviews that liked the book and explained why.
He wrote a short paper listing the good things those reviewers said.
What they found
Most early reviewers said Skinner’s ideas were useful and made sense.
The paper gives you the exact words you can quote when someone says “everyone hated Verbal Behavior.”
How this fits with other research
Goulardins et al. (2013) shows you can use Skinner’s verbal operants today to assess kids with autism.
Palya (1993) uses the same operants to pick sign language over other AAC tools.
van Timmeren et al. (2016) keeps the list going by tracking thirty new verbal-behavior papers in one year.
Together they show the field never stopped using Skinner’s ideas—it just stopped arguing about them.
Why it matters
Next time a teacher or parent says “Skinner was debunked,” you can open this paper and read them three positive quotes from 1957.
It saves you from a long fight and lets you get back to teaching mands, tacts, and intraverbals.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The extensive attention devoted to Noam Chomsky's review of Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner has resulted in a neglect of more than a dozen other rewiews of the work. These are surveyed and found to be positive and congenial in tone, with many of the reviewers advancing his/her own analysis of speech and language. The dominant criticism of the book was its disregard of central or implicit processes and its lack of experimental data. An examination of the receptive history of Verbal Behavior offers a more balanced historical account than those which rely excessively on Chomsky's commentary.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 1992 · doi:10.1007/BF03392877