In a recent paper in this Journal, Skinner, Cautillli, & Hantula (2003) analyze various aspects of Nonstandard English, and they arrive at a number of interesting conclusions. However, although there is much to say about these conclusions, I will not deal with them here. Rather, I want to concentrate on the section that deals with historical accounts of language studies and, in particular, on their criticism of Chomsky's views regarding verbal behavior. In their paper, Skinner et al. (2003) repeat the usual behavior-analytic arguments against Chomsky. However, just as most behavior-analysts, they do not realize that these arguments fail to respond to the essential component of Chomsky's claim. In addition, as long as behavior analysts have not refuted this component, it is very unlikely that a dialogue can be established between them and psycholinguists. I will therefore deal again with this issue, although I have already done so in the past (see, e.g., Stemmer, 1987a, 1987b, 1990, 1994) Keywords: verbal behavior, Skinner Chomsky debate, psycholinguistics, functional analysis of language.
