Table Of ContentVERBAL CONDITIONING
A ND BEHAVIOUR
J. P. DAS
Research Professor, University of Alberta,
Edmonton, Canada
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PREFACE
THE LAST fifteen years have witnessed an upsurge of research and
theory in the area of verbal behaviour. Generally, the motivation
for this increased effort has been the desire to test the applicability
of principles of behaviour derived from animal studies to the
symbolic processes in man. The present book attempts to clarify
certain key issues in the area of verbal behaviour, focusing both on
problems which are continuous and those which are discontinuous
with animal learning research. It is essentially a monograph of
research into certain select areas of complex verbal behaviour.
Where possible, the empirical findings have been interpreted
within the general context of conditioning.
The book was planned while I was a visiting professor at George
Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, Tennessee under the
sponsorship of Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. Most of it
was written during my tenure of visiting professorship at the
Psychology Department of the University of California, Los
Angeles, 1964-5. It was finally completed in 1966 upon return to
my alma mater, Utkal University, in India.
Many academic colleagues at George Peabody College and
at UCLA have helped me in planning and writing this book.
Dr. L.H. Storms of UCLA patiently read most of the manuscript,
and suggested several valuable alterations. Dr. N. O'Connor of
the Institute of Psychiatry and Dr. J. Tizard of the Institute of
Education, University of London have read through parts of the
manuscript. I am deeply indebted to all of them. However, I am
solely responsible for whatever inadequacies there may be in the
book.
The book is dedicated to my parents as a token of my gratitude for
their sacrifice and constant support for my academic achievements.
September 1968 J. P. DAS
Edmonton
vii
CHAPTER 1
CLASSICAL AND VERBAL
CONDITIONING
THE INDIVIDUAL is constantly engaged in acquiring, assimilating,
and manipulating words and symbols. Numerous, and often
conflicting verbal stimuli impinge upon him, compelling him to
develop unique patterns of verbal response. Since childhood, the
verbal milieu to which he is exposed has become as important
a force in shaping his personality as his inherited characteristics.
Therefore, an analysis of the individual's verbal behaviour provides
us with clues for the understanding of his thoughts, enduring atti-
tudes, and temperamental characteristics. The knowledge obtained
from such analysis can be subsequently utilized in predicting his
future course of action. Thus a proper study of man should begin
with man's verbal output.
In this book, verbal behaviour is broken down into a series of
verbal habits. The unit of verbal behaviour is an acquired habit
amenable to analysis as a conditioned response (CR). Conditioning
has been used in its broad sense throughout the book. It provides
an objective tool for the investigation of verbal behaviour. It has
also supplied us with a general model for the explanation of verbal
behaviour. We have tried to avoid the pitfalls of parochialism,
which comes of being committed to a dogma. Conditioning is a
principle, not a dogma, which we have attempted to apply whenever
possible. In the following section we trace its heritage.
The Pavlovian Heritage
It may appear, superficially, that the use of the term conditioned
reflex in place of response has kept the Russian psychologists
alienated from their European and American counterparts. How-
ever, a reflex does not connote an unchangeable nonadaptive
behaviour as contrasted against a response. Conditional reflexes
1
2 VERBAL CONDITIONING AND BEHAVIOUR
are marked by their adaptability. They are temporary connections
subject to modification and correction when they are no longer
useful to the organism. In this sense they are no less flexible than
responses and, indeed, this is the sense in which "reflex" has been
used in contemporary Soviet psychology. Sechenov, who made
extensive application of reflex in describing cortical functions,
was himself deeply influenced by his training in Western Europe.
So was his follower, Pavlov. The scientific work of these pioneers
could not be viewed in isolation. Their work was partly a reflection,
and partly an extension of the existing trend of European physiology
at their time.
We have viewed verbal responses as CRs in this book. What we
mean by doing this is that, like its nonverbal counterpart, a verbal
response is determined and it involves the modification of physio-
logical structures.
Pavlov was a pioneer in that he gave us a conditioning inter-
pretation of verbal behaviour. His ingenious formulation of the
concept of the second signalling system bridged the gap between
perceptual and symbolic stimuli. The first and second systems of
signals, or the direct and the verbal systems share a common
rationale for their evolution. Conditioned stimuli (CSs) provide
advance information about some imminent stimuli and prepare
the animal for the latter's reception (salivation for food, paw with-
drawal for shock). They also help the animal to adapt his behaviour
to a new environment. For conditioned reflexes, unlike the un-
conditioned ones, are flexible and docile. Conditioned responses
are temporary connections, readily developed between unrelated
stimulus-response (S-R) elements, and easily extinguished when
they outlive their use.
The functions fulfilled by conditional reflexes in subhuman
species are relatively simple compared to the demands for adjust-
ment in the complex human world. Therefore, it becomes necessary
for us to represent the primary stimuli of the environment by
symbols. The symbols are verbal, and are expressed through
speech, which allows them to be easily manipulated. However,
the vocal characteristics of languages are of secondary importance.
Consider the person who is dumb but who can express himself
effectively with gestures and signs. The essential abilities for such
expression are abstraction and generalization. Comprehension of
the abstract is lacking in the various kinds of talking birds who
CLASSICAL AND VERBAL CONDITIONING 3
can effectively imitate human speech, and perhaps this inability
to abstract is the only factor which prevents the subhuman species
from having a language system. Every word we use represents a
general concept. The concept does not necessarily have a clearly
defined counterpart in the world,of sense-perception. Its use would
thus require a considerably developed ability at abstraction which
does not exist even in an anthropoid such as the chimpanzee. Per-
haps, given such ability, man's anthropoid cousins would have
acquired, through evolution, appropriate vocal apparatus for
intelligible speech (see Vygotsky, 1962).
Words, the second signals, or signals of primary signals, are a
uniquely human possession, and assume a dominant role. They
"denote everything taken in by human beings directly from the
outer as well as from the inner worlds; they were used not only in
mutual intercourse, but also in self communication" (Ivanov-Smo-
lenskii, 1954, p. 223). However, the verbal system is as firmly
based on the structures in the brain as the direct system, which
makes it a proper subject of study for the physiologists.
With the development and use of the verbal system, some interac-
tion between the first and the second signals becomes inevitable.
As the child grows older, the verbal system begins to predominate.
An adult with a fully developed verbal system may function exclu-
sively in the world of verbal reality most of the time: he knows
about objects and events through reading and listening to others,
and not necessarily by directly experiencing them. His perceptual
and motor responses come to be initiated and controlled by his
own speech. The verbal world provides him with a tight system of
reality.
Role of Speech
Luria has done extensive work on the initiating and regulatory
role of speech (1961, 1963). Like his predecessors, Pavlov (1928,
1941) and Platonov (1959), he regards speech as a form of verbal
CR. The advantages of having a second signalling system are spelled
out in simple experiments by Luria. These show that with the
use of speech, the human child can go far beyond the limits of his
physical capacity.
The basic element of speech is the word. Phonemes are the basic
sound elements of a word, but are not the significative elements
4 VERBAL CONDITIONING AND BEHAVIOUR
of speech. How does a word influence a man's activity? Platonov
suggested that a word is a "naturally conditioned stimulus" and
its mode of influence is "exclusively physiological" (Young, 1941).
Pavlov would answer this by pointing out that a word, a CS,
arouses the same activity as that of its primary stimulus.
A predecessor of the above theories was the familiar ideo-motor
theory which explained how ideas cause movements. In the field
of complex human communications, specially with regard to the
effect of verbal suggestions, the theory proved to be adequate.
•However, it was mentalistic in as much as it did not assume a struc-
tural basis for the idea. In contrast, Pavlov, Platonov, or Luria
advocate a hard-headed behaviourist approach. Hull (1933) in
his early work on suggestibility appears to have been impressed
with the utility of the ideo-motor hypothesis but objected to its
assumption that an idea is a nonphysical entity. An ingenious
modification of the hypothesis was introduced by Hull. According
to him an idea was a pure stimulus act or an act whose sole purpose
was to generate a stimulus. Hull made many uses of this newly
coined term in his subsequent systems (Hull, 1943, 1952) where he
described fractional anticipatory goal responses as pure stimulus
acts. In fact, now the term is generally used for providing an S-R
interpretation of such cognitive processes like expectancy and
anticipation. For example, Osgood (1953) has made good use of
this concept in his mediational hypothesis which, as we shall see,
is crucial for a behaviouristic interpretation of meaning. The follow-
ing extract from Hull (1933) provides a good description of the
ideo-motor hypothesis as it was reformulated in a manner acceptable
to the behaviourist : 'The proprioceptive stimuli arising from
such (symbolic) acts, usually spoken words, are assumed, when
combined in certain patterns, to have acquired during the previous
history of the subject, through the process of association or condi-
tioning, the capacity to evoke the reactions of which they are the
names" (Hull, 1933, pp. 398-9). Today, some behaviourists would
not insist that proprioceptive stimuli are necessary, but would
consider changes in the central nervous system to be sufficient.
When a child is learning to use words, a word stands for an
actual object in whose presence an adult has used the word. The
child thus comes to associate the word with the object. But this
stage is soon superseded when the word is used in the presence of
other objects and in conjunction with other words. The word
CLASSICAL AND VERBAL CONDITIONING 5
then becomes an abstract symbol with considerable generality in
its usage. The multitude of shades of meaning of a word is not
acquired in a strict conditioning paradigm—by associating a
primary stimulus with a word. Indeed, within the small range of
experience of a child, such a process of meaning-acquisition would
severely limit the number of words a child could learn in a year.
We always learn from each others' experiences. The information
gathered by one generation is passed on to the next, and this is
why we can make progress. The same thing is true of language
acquisition. A major part of this learning occurs by the association
of man with other men (Leontiev in O'Connor, 1961).
Having acquired speech and language, how does a child benefit
from it? Like nonverbal CRs, is language merely an adaptive
response? Verbal CRs are not only adaptive responses, but serve
to change the conditions under which they occur. A child, by
means of his speech, actively modifies his environment and alters
the relative strength of the stimuli affecting him, and then adapts
his behaviour to the stimuli thus modified (Luria, 1961). As an
example, Luria describes an experiment where a child responded
to the formerly weak background rather than to the strong figure
on a stimulus card. The figures were green or red aeroplanes on
grey or yellow background. Children squeezed a ball in response
to the figures in the noninstructed condition. But when their atten-
tion was drawn to yellow (the plane can fly when the sun is shining),
and to grey (the plane cannot fly because it is rainy), the children
attended to the weaker elements of the stimulus. Thus, by the intro-
duction of speech, the natural law of figure being stronger than
ground was reversed (Luria, 1961, p. 6). Several simple experiments
have been presented by Luria to establish the role of even primitive
speech in the speeding up of learning. One example is naming an
object before the name itself is understood by the child. Children
between 12 and 30 months were required to learn to find a sweet
under a red box and nothing under a green box. Their learning was
speeded up three times when the experimenter named the colours
of the boxes. This learning was also considerably more resistant to
forgetting.
Labelling the to-be-discriminated stimuli helps to orient the
learner to the object's distinctive cues. This would have a facili-
tatory effect on learning. Thus one of the major functions of speech
is to orient the individual to his immediate surroundings. Even the
6 VERBAL CONDITIONING AND BEHAVIOUR
irrational speech of young children, no more distinct than babbling,
serves an orienting function. Luria calls this accompanying speech
which is not necessarily rational. Perhaps this speech neither initia-
tes nor regulates activity.
A distinction has been made by Vygotsky (1962) between rational
and irrational speech. He claims that speech is irrational in the
infant, whereas thought is rational. Gradually, speech becomes
rational as it begins to express the thought of an individual which
was initially nonverbal. Until about adolescence, thought and
speech do not overlap completely. Even all adult speech is not
necessarily rational. Luria's experiments illustrate how verbal
stimuli may be used to influence behaviour in all stages of the deve-
lopment of rational speech.
A few experiments serve to illustrate the point. At about the begin-
ning of the second year adult speech can initiate simple activities
in the child, but once the activity has been started it cannot be
stopped by adult speech. To the command "Squeeze the balloon",
the child responds by squeezing it, but when told to stop, he may
squeeze it all the more. The excitatory role of speech appears to
be predominant at that age. However, the child can be taught to
inhibit his motor action. The technique is to teach the child to
develop a competing second response in the same situation in
order to inhibit the first.
When can the child's own speech initiate his responses? When
he is 3 or 4 the child learns to press the balloon twice and no more
whenever a conditioned signal is presented. This he can do by
associating every response with the verbal reaction "go, go".
That is, every time the signals to press twice come on, the child
presses twice by synchronizing the squeezes with his words "go,
go". Without the aid of verbal activity, the motor part of the task
cannot be mastered.
The speech elements "go, go" have here only an impelling func-
tion and not a significative one. In other words, the child is not
reacting to the meaning of these words. How do we know this?
Instead of asking the child to say "go, go" he was asked to say
"twice" to indicate that he was to press two times. What was obtain-
ed was a long squeezing reaction rather than two short ones. Speech
acquires its significative role fully around the age of 4-1/2 years.
When significative speech is fairly developed it is interiorized.
According to Luria, internal speech is a prerequisite for the emer-
CLASSICAL AND VERBAL CONDITIONING 7
gence of thought. Internal speech helps the development of internal
verbal connections. The child attends to specific points in his
environment as he is prompted by internally formulated instruc-
tions. The physical stimuli affecting the child are reinterpreted
through the mediation of the speech system, making conditioning
a complex process with a high degree of self-regulation.
Nonverbal Classical and Verbal Conditioning
Verbal conditioning would subsume any type of conditioning
where speech plays a major role. Nonverbal CRs which are mediated
by external instructions, or which flow from a set of rules that the
subject has constructed to guide his responses, would be designated
as verbal conditioning.
It would be a mistake to regard verbal conditioning as merely
an extension of classical conditioning principles into the sphere
of verbal behaviour. Many laws of nonverbal classical conditioning
have to be modified, abridged, or discarded in verbal conditioning.
Pavlov clearly perceived this. In any human experiment, Pavlov
did not expect that the subject would behave like an animal strapped
to a stand; he would stop to analyse the learning situation. In
fact, Pavlov was in favour of designing complex learning situations
for human subjects where the solutions would require some
reasoning, and would recommend that when a person was given any
test of conditioning it might be desirable to ascertain his verbal
reactions to the test. Giving the example of a typical shock-hand-
withdrawal experiment, Pavlov remarked that if the subject decided
to withdraw his hand only when the shock actually caused him some
pain and not to withdraw until this happened, he had already
achieved the level of conditioning that takes 100 trials (Ο' Connor,
1961, p. 245).
Learning in animals is gradual, as is revealed in the familar condi-
tioning experiments of Pavlov. Once established, it cannot be
immediately extinguished. As CRs get stronger with continuous
reinforcement, so also consistent nonreinforcement leads to
gradual decrement of their strength. Reversal of firmly elaborated
CRs consequently becomes a slow process.
In contrast, human beings may acquire a response immediately,
and its continued evocation may be maintained and regulated by
speech. The verbalization of the relationship between the CS and
