Verbal behavior example in everyday life. In 1957, BF Skinner wrote the book Verbal Behavior. Skinner said that language is a behavior and can best be broken down in the same three-term contingency we use to analyze all behavior. There’s an antecedent, a behavior happens, and a consequence occurs. Skinner looked at the function of language and gave them all different names (these are the verbal operants), such as mand, tact, intraverbal, echoic, listener responding, etc). He argued that language