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Our definition of verbal behavior, incidentally, includes the behavior of experimental animals where reinforcements are supplied by an experimenter or by an apparatus designed to establish contingencies which resemble those maintained by the normal listener. The animal and the experimenter comprise a small but genuine verbal community. This may offend our sense of the proprieties, but there is consolation in the fact that such a relation as that represented by the abstract tact is susceptible to laboratory study. (p. 108)