Some implications for psycholinguistic theory

Most linguists and many psycholinguists, convinced by Chomsky’s review (1959) of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957) and Fodor’s critique of neo-behaviorism’s mediation models (1965, 1966) that contemporary learning theories are incapable ‘in principle’ of handling language behavior, have been looking elsewhere for a ‘ more powerful ’ theory of performance. Not finding anything else of interest in psychology, it was natural to turn to generative grammar itself not only as a theory of language competence but also as a model for a performance theory as well. This approach has proven quite sterile, as Chomsky himself (1961) predicted it would: ‘ The attempt to develop a reasonable account of the speaker has, I believe, been hampered by the prevalent and utterly mistaken view that a generative grammar itself provides or is related in some obvious way to a model for the speaker’ (1961, footnote #16). Not only can it be easily shown that any contemporary generative grammar is itself incapable ‘ in principle ’ of handling language performance, but I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere (Osgood, 1966, 1970) that Fodor’s critique of representational mediation theory is untenable.