Behavioral Approaches to Language and Communication

Abstract

In the 1950s, there was a spirited and sometimes acrimonious debate between psycholinguists and behaviorists concerning the proper way of conceptualizing language (Chomsky, 1959; Skinner, 1957). It appears, in retrospect, that much of the controversy stemmed from the fact that proponents of the two viewpoints had legitimate but orthogonal goals. Thus, psycholinguists were most interested in being able to construct a grammar, that is, a system of rules capable of accounting for all possible language outputs, outputs that were of interest only as a reflection of underlying linguistic competence. Since competence is determined by the interaction of a number of cognitive processes, an individual’s performance, that is, his or her verbal behavior, is peripheral to this approach. Behaviorists, in contrast, had little interest in understanding the formal properties of language or its underlying cognitive determinants, but they had a great deal of interest in understanding how language could be used by one individual to influence the behavior of another. Thus, for the behaviorist, systematic manipulation of verbal behavior became of paramount importance and educational intervention quickly assumed a central place in the research literature of the field. Today, much of the Stürm and Dräng that characterized the early period of behaviorism has increasingly given way to a sense of curiosity about nonbehavioral approaches to understanding language. There are two reasons for the calm that now follows the storm. First, it has become obvious