Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition

B. F. Skinner

528 pages / paperback / $30.00
ISBN: 978-099645391-2

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Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition provides a comprehensive account of B. F. Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior. It includes three articles that cover parts of this analysis that, over subsequent years, had evolved considerably beyond what he presented in the book: A Lecture on Having a Poem (1971), The Evolution of Verbal Behavior (1986), and The Behavior of the Listener (1989). They address creativity, how verbal behavior arose, and the role that listeners play in his analysis.

Skinner called Verbal Behavior his most important book. It took him over twenty years to complete it. The book extends his laboratory-based research on selection-by-consequences to the behavior of talking, writing, gesturing, and even thinking. These verbal actions differ from other behavior, he explains, because they do not operate on the environment directly, but rather through the behavior of a verbal community. Skinner illustrates his analysis with examples from literature, the arts, and the sciences, as well as from his own verbal behavior and that of his colleagues and children. Today, teachers and parents who work with children or adults lacking verbal skills will find Skinner s analysis key to teaching others to communicate effectively.