Abstract
Behavior analysts should distinguish between the intraverbal, as a class of verbal operants, and intraverbal control, the potentiating effect, however slight, of a verbal antecedent on a verbal response. If it is to serve an explanatory function, the term intraverbal, as a class of verbal operants, should be restricted to those cases in which a verbal antecedent, as the result of a history of contiguous or correlated usage, is sufficient to evoke the putative intraverbal response. Intraverbal control is pervasive in verbal behavior, but since it is typically just one of many concurrent variables that determine the form of a verbal response, such multiply controlled responses are not usefully called “intraverbals.” Because intraverbals and their controlling variables have invariant formal properties, they are conceptually simple, but they nevertheless play a central role in the interpretation of complex phenomena such as the structural regularities in verbal behavior (i.e., grammar).
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Notes
The concept of joint control is required as well. See Lowenkron (1998) for an exposition of this point.
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This article is part of a special section on the intraverbal relation in The Analysis of Verbal Behavior.
The author thanks David Roth and Mark Sundberg for their helpful exchanges on the topic of intraverbal control.
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Palmer, D.C. On Intraverbal Control and the Definition of the Intraverbal. Analysis Verbal Behav 32, 96–106 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40616-016-0061-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40616-016-0061-7