Introduction to RFT in EIBI: Sample Lesson Material

Both Skinner’s and an RFT analysis of verbal behavior all allow us to conduct a functional analysis of “languaging.” We take the standpoint that while RFT has extended and refined a functional view of language as behavior that allows for even greater precision, scope, and depth of analysis than Skinner’s original work, it is important to understand that original analysis and what it brings to a complete behavior analytic account of complex human behavior. The terminology and framework of Skinnerian analyses of verbal behavior, and the research and applied programs that have emerged from this analysis, help behavior analysts focus on how responses come under specific types of stimulus control and direct contingencies of reinforcement. This is particularly important in examining early language development and how to teach early languaging (initial verbal operants). The classification framework of verbal operants also highlights how different sources of control establish different functions of words as stimuli. For example, tacting—contacting the environment—helps words acquire many functions, including perceptual, appetitive, and aversive functions. Manding may also be involved in establishing some of the appetitive and aversive functions of words, as the words are related to the stimuli involved in reinforcing mands. Establishing intraverbal control allows words to acquire a wide variety of discriminative functions, and so on. 

The terminology and framework of RFT helps behavior analysts focus from the very beginning of language programming on emergent, generative language as responding to relational patterns between stimuli rather than solely focusing on establishing a specific discriminative stimulus. In parallel with programming to expand sources of control from a Skinnerian verbal operant perspective, taking an RFT lens allows us to precisely analyze and teach patterns of relational responding from early nonarbitrary through complex arbitrarily applicable relational responding. RFT work also highlights how words have stimulus functions and that it is these functions that give words “meaning.” Once words acquire more functions, those functions can then transfer and transform through relational networks.

In this next video I summarize these basic points of integration.