This article memorializes Kurt Salzinger (1929-2018). Salzinger's main focus of research was schizophrenic speech and its functional characteristics. Collaborating with several colleagues, most notably Stephanie Portnoy (nee Pisoni) and Richard S. Feldman, he documented verbal conditioning without awareness through ingenious experiments in the clinic waiting room, finding that patients with schizophrenia differed from normal controls only in their rates of extinction. They then found that self-referencing statements not only were susceptible to subtle reinforcers, but also that speed of such conditioning predicted the duration of hospitalization. Addressing more generally, they found evidence for an "immediacy hypothesis," whereby individuals with schizophrenia reacted to an extremely limited range of immediate events, including their own utterances. Among the acknowledgments of the quality of his research were an NSF Award for Sustained Superior Performance in 1981 and "The Most Meritorious Article in 1994" award by the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).