ABSTRACT
Psychologists largely ignored language until the last twenty years. It was once thought that verbal learning research would lead to an understanding of natural language because this research was supposed to identify the laws of verbal habit formation. The various learning theory approaches to language (Mowrer, 1960; Osgood, Suci, & Tannebaum, 1957; Skinner, 1957; Staats, 1968) claimed that simple habit formation underlay language comprehension and use. However, it has since become clear (Bever, 1968; Bever, Fodor, & Garrett, 1968; Chomsky, 1959, 1968; Fodor, 1965; Garrett & Fodor, 1968; McNeill, 1968) that this is not so. Except for these learning-theory-based approaches, almost the only analyses of language had been diary accounts of child language acquisition and word count studies (see McCarthy, 1954, for a review).
