Behavior analysis and psycholinguistics

Abstract

The field of psycholinguistics became prominent during the 1950s and 1960s, when cognitive psychologists and others began to criticize existing behavioral approaches to language and to offer their own alternative explanations. Two criticisms were prominent. One criticism was developmental in nature. According to this criticism, there was no evidence to support the behaviorist claim that “feedback” from the environment played a significant and meaningful role in the development of linguistic processes in children, in contrast to the “independent contribution of the organism.” Particular points of contention concerned stimulus control and any reinforcement that caregivers provided to children’s verbal responses. The second criticism was theoretical in nature. According to this criticism, the appeal to empirical factors in general, and theoretical behavioral mechanisms in particular, such as covert associative mediators, cannot adequately explain such linguistic phenomena as grammar and syntax. Psycholinguists then offered their own alternative explanations of linguistic processes in terms of innate capacities for language learning, transformational/generational/computational rules, and a variety of information processing metaphors. Closer examination of the two criticisms mentioned above indicates that neither applies to behavior analysis. The first criticism assumes a view of the effects of environmental variables that behavior analysis does not actually hold. An analysis based on a more accurate rendition of the behavior analytic view reveals quite orderly relations among verbal behavior and environmental variables in developing children, particularly as those relations involve influence from caregivers. The second criticism assumes a position on theoretical terms that actually pertains more to S-O-R mediational neobehaviorism than behavior analysis, although there is some question as to how general this position is in mediational neobehaviorism. In any case, unlike either psycholinguistics or S-O-R mediational neobehaviorism, behavior analysis uses a systematic set of behavioral principles to explain the development and maintenance of any kind of behavior, simple or complex, verbal or nonverbal. Foremost among these principles is that verbal behavior may be dealt with as a subject matter in the behavioral dimension, and not as an indicant of processes going on in somewhere else, in some other dimension, such that it must be talked about in different terms.