Hey all, welcome back to our Talk the Talk series on the verbal operants, a key component to understanding verbal behavior. Today we’ll be covering intraverbals.
An intraverbal is a verbal behavior in which the form of response is under the functional control of a verbal SD that does not have point-to-point correspondence* with the verbal stimulus” (Cooper, Heron, & Heward, 2020 p. 416).
Bonus Term!
*Point-to-point correspondence – The beginning, middle, and end of a response match the stimulus presented before it. Examples of this include but aren’t limited to echoing/repeating a sample response, copying text, imitating a modeled action.
In other words, an intraverbal is a verbal response to a verbal stimulus (SD) that is different than that response.
It can be a bit tricky to understand just by reading definitions though, so let’s take a look at some intraverbal exchanges.