Other researchers were aware of Tolman’s work, but for most American psychologists
in the 1940s, the use of the term cognitive was diffi cult to accept because it violated
the behaviorists’ idea that internal processes, such as thinking or maps in the
head, were not acceptable topics to study. It wasn’t until about a decade after Tolman
introduced the idea of cognitive maps that developments occurred that were to lead to
a resurgence of the mind in psychology. Ironically, one of these developments was the
publication, in 1957, of a book by B. F. Skinner titled Verbal Behavior. In this book,
Skinner argued that children learn language through operant conditioning. According
to this idea, children imitate speech that they hear and repeat correct speech because it
is rewarded. But in 1959 Noam Chomsky, a linguist from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, published a scathing review of Skinner’s book, in which he pointed out that
children say many sentences that have never been rewarded by parents (“I hate you,
Mommy,” for example), and that during the normal course of language development,
they go through a stage in which they use incorrect grammar, such as “the boy hitted
the ball,” even though this incorrect grammar may never have been reinforced.