Studies of speech in thinking

An important property of verbal behavior is that it functions in loosely aggregated fashion; that is, it is organized in terms of classes of responses, as well as single instances, and these classes have unique interesting properties, as such. Skinner's (1935) concept of the operant response as inherently generic in character is especially well-suited to this view. An empirical application of his ideas requires showing how different experimental operations can incorporate these collective properties of verbal responses to generate reproducible behavioral processes. There are many such possible experiments; The research presented shows only a sample of the possibilities. These include a demonstration of how descriptive statements and the contingencies applied to them may produce "attentional" effects in discrimination learning; how the amount of speech occurring in a memory task may affect the number of items remembered; how the output in a restricted association task may be actively regulated; how this regulatory effect is generalized, and appears in discursive monologs, such as occur in "brainstorming." Both the attentional and regulatory effects demonstrated appear when the subject's speech is treated generically, rather than as discrete, relatively isolated statements.