A boy looks up at the sky and says, 'A bird!' What type of verbal operant is this vocalization?

• A. An echoic
• B. A mand
• C. An intraverbal
• D. A tact

Answer: (D)

The main idea here is labeling a seen object with a verbal label. When the boy looks at the bird and says “A bird,” he’s producing a spoken label in response to a nonverbal stimulus (the bird he sees). That makes this a tact—a verbal operant controlled by the environmental object or event and reinforced by social interaction.

It isn’t echoic, because he isn’t repeating something he heard. It isn’t a mand, because he’s not requesting or demanding something. It isn’t intraverbal, because the response isn’t in reaction to a spoken prompt or part of a verbal conversation—it's a label for what’s in the environment.