Cathy says 'Stop copying me!' and her brother repeats it. This is most closely which verbal operant?

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

Answer: (B)

This item tests an echoic operant: vocal imitation of a spoken stimulus. Echoic behavior occurs when a person repeats the exact words or sounds that another person has spoken, showing point-to-point correspondence and formal similarity. In this scenario, the brother repeats Cathy’s spoken phrase exactly, which is textbook echoic.

A mand would be a request driven by a motivating operation, which isn’t at play here. A tact is labeling a nonverbal object or event, which also doesn’t fit. An intraverbal is responding to a verbal stimulus with a related, but not identical, response, such as answering a question or continuing a conversation with different words. None of those fit as well as echoic in this case.