TYPES OF BEHAVIOR.

Echoic behavior is very useful for adults in establishing, especially but not uniquely in children, a
repertoire of verbal units that will serve for the acquisition of new units.
Textual behavior is reinforced, as well, because it facilitates the acquisition of other verbal
operants. Moreover, it frees the verbal stimuli generated by the speakers’ behavior from their personal
presence. Textual behavior also allows speakers control of their own future behavior when responding
to discriminative stimuli generated by their own writing; it has the additional advantage over auto-
echoic behavior of leaving permanent marks.
Intraverbal behavior allows the acquisition of knowledge that is constituted basically of
connections between verbal stimuli; these connections parallel relations between stimuli and properties
of stimuli in the physical and cultural environment such as, for example, historical facts, definitions,
tables of elements, etc.
Autoclitic behavior is also directed mainly toward the practical consequences of verbal behavior
– generally by preventing the listener from taking improper practical actions, as the listener might do
under control of verbal stimuli that result from the speaker’s behavior if the listener does not have
access to the kind of variables that control parcels of the speaker’s verbal behavior. Autoclitic behavior
lies in the effect it has upon the listener - including the speaker himself.
THE CONCEPT OF THE FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE/VERBAL BEHAVIOR HELD BY THESE TWO AUTHORS IS SIMILAR
IN SEVERAL IMPORTANT RESPECTS, OF WHICH THE FOLLOWING DESERVE TO BE HIGHLIGHTED:
 Speech has an effect on listeners, also, by changing their predisposition toward speakers
 Language/verbal behavior constitutes a very large part of thinking, and thinking allows speakers to
control other parcels of their own behavior;
 Writing extends verbal stimuli so that they can act upon readers situated historically and geographically
distant from the writer.
 Mathematics is a form of language/verbal behavior derived mainly from counting;
 Language/verbal behavior is the origin of products such as maps, diagrams, written calculations, tables
of elements, etc.;
BLOOMFIELD'S CONCEPT OF LANGUAGE IN SCIENTFIC ACTIVITY
Bloomfield studied how language was used in the growth of scientific knowledge and how it is
related to the non-linguistic part of scientific activity.
Bloomfield lamented the fact that people outside the field of linguistics have no knowledge of it. Even
scientists and philosophers are often unaware of the extent to which their knowledge is founded on
language. He said: “The endless confusion of what is written about the foundations of science or of
mathematics is due very largely to the authors' lack of linguistic information”.
In Bloomfield’s perspective, science shall deal only with events that are accessible in their time
and place to any and all observers or only with events that are placed in co-ordinates of time and space.
For Bloomfield, the above requirements did not exclude any part of the world from the scope of
science because, although of different origins, these requirements have the same meaning relative to
scientific methods, and “this delimitation does not restrict the subject matter of science but rather
characterizes its method”
SKINNER'S CONCEPT OF VERBAL BEHAVIOR AND SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY
According to Skinner, logical and scientific methodology had been analyzing logical and
scientific verbal behavior and the practices of the community that maintains it;
These analyses and their products are also verbal behavior, and one "of the ultimate activities of
a science of verbal behavior may be an experimental logic, or a descriptive and analytical scientific
epistemology, the terms and practices of which will be adapted to human behavior as a subject matter" .