The production of verbal operants not previously taught is an important aspect of language productivity. For Skinner, new mands, tacts, and autoclitics result from the recombination of verbal operants. The relation between these mands, tacts, and autoclitics is what linguists call "analogy," a grammatical pattern that serves as a foundation on…

Reasoning from recent psycholinguistic research, it was predicted that discrimination between two monochromatic stimuli would be poorer when they belong to the same color category, better when they belong to different color categories in the language of the observer. Accordingly, it was predicted that hue discrimination functions vary…

Results of an experiment to test predictions derived from balance theory about social influence and communication within a psychological treatment situation indicated that subjects changed their meanings of words when such changes were advocated by the counselors, and reported increased confidence when they apparently agreed with the counselors…

Formal, contextual, and technical aspects of language teaching methodology design are discussed in this article. The author develops a basis for tentative classification of language drills and exercises in terms of linguistic behavior in the light of these aspects. Basic language skills are classified according to three types of stimulus-response…

An analysis of part-of-speech membership was made utilizing certain mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the nature of word classes. It was proposed that words of the same form class constitute "verbal habit families" on the basis of either a common grammatical meaning response, a common affix, or a common label (e.g., "verb"). One…