La evolución de los trabajos empíricos sobre conducta verbal

Resumo

Only a year after the publication of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957), its criticism by Chomsky often has been suggested to have been largely responsible for the widespread idea of failure of his approach. This criticism could have discouraged for decades analyses of verbal behavior based on an experimental analysis, but Skinner’s book continued to be sold and cited. However, the number of empirical studies based on Verbal Behavior during the almost thirty years after publication remained very low. This paper is based on some of the major studies that have analyzed the progress of empirical research on verbal behavior up to the beginning of the XXI century, and then make a bibliometric analysis of the years between 1980 and 2015. The distribution of these items among the major journals, the relative presence of each of the verbal operants of the Skinner taxonomy, and the interaction between them and with other areas of research is discussed. The results show not only the health of Verbal Behavior as a theoretical structure generating experimental hypotheses, but also the boom of empirical research in recent decades.