Verbal Frontiers: Combining Words in the Wild, Computational Modeling, and Behavior Analysis to Explore Verbal...

Significant advancements in science occur when previously unobservable or immeasurable things critical to theory become observable and measurable. The "verbal community" is a case in point; it plays a critical role in the analysis of verbal behavior, but has primarily been described theoretically, as observing, measuring, or directly analyzing verbal communities has historically been difficult. In this article, we review recent technological advances in data collection and computational modeling that allow researchers to directly observe and measure verbal communities in real-time as they evolve. Because data are often collected at the individual level, researchers can directly observe, measure, and model the influence of a verbal community on the behavior of individual speakers and listeners. This approach is demonstrated through two examples in which two distinct verbal communities were directly observed, measured, described, and modeled. In doing so, previously vague theoretical descriptions and novel, nuanced questions about verbal communities and their influence on the behavior of speakers and listeners can be addressed and answered with empirical data. It should be noted that the approaches discussed herein rely on structural analyses of textual stimuli. Though uncommon in behavior analysis, future research demonstrating how integrating structural and functional approaches to the analysis of verbal behavior may lead to novel advances in our understanding of verbal behavior.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40614-025-00484-y.