Mediation Processes and the Acquisition of Linguistic Structure

Abstract

When psychologists have addressed themselves to questions concerning mediation and language, they have dealt in the main with two general classes of problems: (a) language as a mediating behavior and (b) nonlinguistic mediating responses as explicators of the meaning of lexical items. In the first case, exemplified by the work of Birge (I941), Kuenne (1946), Jeffrey (1953), Cantor (1955), Shepard (1956), Spiker (1956), Spiker, Gerjuoy, and Shepard (1956), Shepard and Schaeffer (I956), and Norcross and Spiker (I958), language is treated as of special importance because it furnishes a label, tag, or response which may be elicited in common by diverse members of some stimulus class.2 Here it appears possible to show that such an intermediary response (whether overt or covert) serves an important role in the other, sometimes nonlinguistic, behaviors of the subjects. In the second case, investigators such as Osgood (1953), Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum (I957), Bousfield (I96I), and Staats and Staats (I957) have been concerned to show that meanings of items may be accounted