Linguistics and Psychology

Abstract

Abstract The link between the study of language and psychology goes back to the beginning of modern psychology, when Wilhelm Wundt (1904) established psychology as an empirical science, independent of philosophy. It was the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1933) who first viewed the study of language, or linguistics as it had come to be known, as a special branch of psychology. The dominant view of psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century was behaviorism, whose central tenet is that only theoretical entities that can be directly observed may be admitted into theories about human behavior. Behaviorists took as the basic notions of their theo-ries stimuli that impinge on the sensory organs of a subject, the subject’s behavioral response to these stimuli, and schedules of reinforcement that induce in the subject tendencies or habits to respond in certain ways when confronted with specific stimuli.