In the study of Verbal Behavior, transfer refers to the process by which control over a response shifts from one source to another, so that behavior established under one set of conditions comes to occur under new but related conditions. Within behavior-analytic accounts of language, this includes the transfer of st…
In the study of Verbal Behavior, transfer refers to the process by which control over a response shifts from one source to another, so that behavior established under one set of conditions comes to occur under new but related conditions. Within behavior-analytic accounts of language, this includes the transfer of stimulus control—as when a learner who can name an object in response to seeing it comes to name it in response to a spoken question—and the spread of functions across different verbal operants such as tacting, manding, and intraverbal responding. Transfer is central to understanding how verbal repertoires expand efficiently, since it allows newly learned relations to generalize beyond the exact situations in which they were taught, and it informs instructional procedures designed to build flexible, functional language. Studying transfer helps clarify how responses generalize across stimuli, settings, and response forms, and how teaching can be arranged to promote such generalization rather than rote, context-bound performance. Within the scope of Verbal Behavior research, transfer connects the analysis of individual verbal operants to the broader goal of producing adaptable and generative communication. This page brings together peer-reviewed, open-access research relevant to transfer and the principles of Verbal Behavior that govern how learned responses come under new forms of control.
12 peer-reviewed articles, ranked by relevance. Each links to its DOI.
The 12 articles above have been cited 28 times in the scholarly literature. Citation data via OpenAlex and Crossref, updated Jun 2026.
A sample of recent works citing this journal's research on Transfer, linking to each citing work.