Structuralism and

Functionalism Schools of
Thought
By Kendra Cherry 

Updated September 01, 2019

When psychology was first established as a science separate from biology and philosophy, the
debate over how to describe and explain the human mind and behavior began. The first two
major schools of psychology to emerge during this time were known as structuralism and
functionalism. While neither of these schools held up long as psychology progressed as a
science, they did make important contributions to the development of modern psychology.

Structuralism, Functionalism, and the Origins of Psychology

Structuralism emerged as the first school of thought and some of the ideas associated with the
structuralist school were advocated by the founder of the first psychology lab, Wilhelm Wundt.
One of Wundt's students, a man named Edward B. Titchener, would later go on to formally
establish and name structuralism, although he broke away from many of Wundt's ideas and at
times even misrepresented the teachings of his mentor.

Almost immediately other theories surfaced to vie for dominance in psychology. In response to
structuralism, an American perspective known as functionalism emerged from thinkers such as
Charles Darwin and William James.

In 1906, Mary Whiton Calkins published an article in Psychological Review asking for a

reconciliation between these two schools of thought. Structuralism and functionalism were not so
different, she argued since both are principally concerned with the conscious self.

Despite this, each side continued to cast aspersions on the other. William James wrote that
structuralism had "plenty of school, but no thought," while Wilhelm Wundt dismissed
functionalism as "literature" rather than science.

Eventually, both of these schools of thought lost dominance in psychology, replaced by the rise
of behaviorism, psychoanalysis, humanism, and cognitive psychology through the beginning and
middle part of the twentieth century.
In order to understand how these early schools of thought influenced the course of psychology,
let's take a closer look at each one.

What Was Structuralism?

Structuralism was the first school of psychology and focused on breaking down mental processes
into the most basic components. Researchers tried to understand the basic elements of
consciousness using a method known as introspection.

Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of the first psychology lab, is often associated with this school of
thought despite the fact that it was his student, Edward B. Titchener, who first coined the term to
describe this school of thought.

While Wundt's work helped to establish psychology as a separate science and contributed
methods to experimental psychology, Wundt himself referred to his view of psychology
as volunteerism and his theories tended to be much more holistic than the ideas that Titchener
later introduced in the United States. Titchener's development of structuralism helped establish
the very first "school" of psychology, but structuralism itself did not last long beyond Titchener's
death.

The Strengths and Criticisms of Structuralism

By today’s scientific standards, the experimental methods used to study the structures of the
mind were too subjective—the use of introspection led to a lack of reliability in results. Other
critics argue that structuralism was too concerned with internal behavior, which is not directly
observable and cannot be accurately measured.

However, these critiques do not mean that structuralism lacked significance. Structuralism is
important because it is the first major school of thought in psychology. The structuralist school
also influenced the development of experimental psychology.

What Was Functionalism?

Functionalism formed as a reaction to structuralism and was heavily influenced by the work
of William James and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. Functionalists sought to
explain the mental processes in a more systematic and accurate manner.

Rather than focusing on the elements of consciousness, functionalists focused on the purpose of

consciousness and behavior. Functionalism also emphasized individual differences, which had a
profound impact on education.

Some of the important functionalist thinkers included William James, John Dewey, Harvey Carr,
and John Angell.

Strengths and Criticisms of Functionalism

Functionalism was criticized perhaps most famously by Wundt. "It is literature. It is beautiful,
but it is not psychology," he said of functionalist William James’ The Principles of Psychology.

Functionalism was an important influence on psychology. It influenced the development of

behaviorism and applied psychology. Functionalism also influenced the educational system,
especially with regards to John Dewey’s belief that children should learn at the level for which
they are developmentally prepared.

A Word From Verywell

While neither of these early schools of thought remains today, they both had an important
influence on the emergence of psychology as modern science. Wundt and Titchener's
structuralism played a role in the drive to make psychology a more experimental science, while
James's functionalism helped focus psychology on the process of actually solving real problems.
By understanding the focus of structuralism and functionalism, you can gain a greater
appreciation of how psychology arrived at the point it is today.

https://www.verywellmind.com/structuralism-and-functionalism-2795248

Difference between structuralism and functionalism

Structuralism and functionalism are two approaches to

psychology. They are also the two earliest psychological theories
that have sought to explain human behavior in different ways and
to approach the study of psychology from different perspectives.
Structuralism appeared first and functionalism was a reaction to
this theory.

Structuralism could be considered as the first formal theory in

psychology that separated it from biology and philosophy into its
own discipline. The structural psychology was first described by
Tichener, a student of Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt created the first
psychological laboratory, so Tichener’s ideas were highly
influenced by the work done there (Goodwin, 2008).

Structuralism or structural psychology was an approach that

attempted to analyze the human mind by establishing basic units
within it. The focus was on these basic unit. The study of the mind
was done through introspection to establish the link between
different inner experiences, like feelings or sensations.
Structuralism was the approach that led to the creation of the first
psychological laboratory and the first attempts at a scientific study
of the human mind. However, the issue with structuralism was
that it was based on an inherently subjective technique –
introspection. The participants had to focus on their feelings and
sensations to report them to the experimenters, however, this
approach was based on subjective measures only, which limited
the accuracy of this approach (Goodwin, 2008).

Soon after it was introduced, structuralism became the subject of

much criticism due to its lack of objectivity, so another theory was
created as a response to structuralism (Schultz & Schultz, 2011).

Functionalism, on the other hand, proposes that consciousness

could not have a basic structure, so it would not be useful to study
it from this point of view. Rather, the idea behind functionalism is
that it would be effective to study the functions and roles of the
human mind rather than its structure. Functionalism was more
focused on behavior (Goodwin, 2008).
Functionalism appeared as a reaction to structuralism, which was
not accepted in America. Psychologists like William James
criticized structuralism and proposed alternatives. James
suggested that the mind and consciousness existed for a purpose,
which should be the focus of the study. He also suggested that
psychology needed to be practical rather than purely theoretical as
was proposed in the structuralist approach. Functionalism also
was focused on more objective aspects rather than introspection.
James believed in consciousness, however, he could not find a
scientific way to study it, so he chose to focus on behavior, which
could be studied objectively (Schultz & Schultz, 2011).

With its practical approach, functionalism laid the groundwork

for behaviorism, a theory that was very focused on objective
measures of human behavior and on seeing the function rather
than the structure of the human mind (Schultz & Schultz, 2011).

Both structuralism and functionalism were important theories in

their time and were among the first formal psychological theories.
Structuralism influenced the development of experimental
psychology and was a theory that began shaping psychology as a
separate field. Functionalism appeared as an answer to
structuralism. It also influenced the development of behaviorism,
a theory that was very significant in psychology. It can be said that
the main difference between structuralism and functionalism is in
what they study. Structuralism studies the human mind and the
basic units that can be identified through introspection.
Functionalism focuses on more objective forms of study and
argues that it’s necessary to study aspects of the mind and
behavior in terms of function. Both approaches have an important
historical significance and have influenced the development of
psychology.
http://www.differencebetween.net/science/health/difference-between-structuralism-and-
functionalism/

Theories of the early stages of language acquisition

What is language?
Language is the primary method of human communication, but there are also
other ways to communicate without the use of language. When asked to
define language we tend to think of a verbal and written system in which
certain sounds and symbols come together in a specific way to convey
meaning. Language in its most complex form is unique to humans, although
some animals have been found to have basic communication patterns.
Languages often have verbal and written components, but how we classify
something like American Sign Language? Animals manage to communicate
— do they have language? How did language evolve? How do we learn
enough language ourselves to begin to answer this question?
Why is it so surprising that we can learn language?
If you’ve ever tried to learn a new language, you know it’s not easy. There
are new rules of grammar which come with many exceptions, new sounds
that are hard to make, endless lists of vocabulary to commit to memory and
so on. And yet, you managed to learn the basics of your very first language
around the time you were two years old; no textbooks in sight.

Not only are children able to absorb the complicated rules of grammar
without formal teaching, they do so from a limited vocabulary. Regardless of
how much a child is spoken to, they will not hear every possible word and
sentence by the time they begin speaking. Yet when they do start to talk,
children begin to follow grammatical rules and apply them to form new,
innovative phrases. This level of information processing is incredibly
impressive in anyone, much less someone still figuring out counting and
skipping!

What do we know?
As is often the case in psychology and sociology, it’s hard to get what we
normally think of as data about language acquisition. It’s not a chemical we
can test for or a distance we can measure (imagine asking a 2 year old how
many words they know — not a particularly useful or productive task,
right? ). However, there are some facts that are generally agreed upon by the
scientific community. The first couple years of life are the critical period for
language learning, which becomes a much harder task as people age.
Children usually say their first words around 10-18 months of age, and
graduate to phrases sometime before they are two years old. In fact, studies
have shown that 18 month olds can tell the difference between correctly
formed verb pairs (is jumping) and incorrect ones (will jumping). Somewhere
between four and seven years old children begin to be able to tell stories that
more or less make sense.

We also know that learning a language is not like walking up the steady
increase of a ramp, but more like walking the hills and valleys of a country
road. Usually when we learn a new skill, the more we practice the better we
get. However, this isn’t always true in the early stages of language
development. When children are first learning to talk, the verbs they use are
usually the most common such as go, eat, talk, give, run, etc. These are often
irregular in the past tense. Although at first they use the past tense properly
(“I ran”, “he went”, etc), kids typically regress for a while. They often over-
follow rules, saying phrases like “I runned” instead of “I ran”. As their
vocabularies expand rapidly (known as vocabulary burst), some researchers
believe children notice patterns in language, and that leads to over-correction
as described in the example above. Eventually, children begin to understand
where the rules apply and where they don’t, and then properly form the past
tense once more. This is known as a U shaped learning curve, because the
language mastery started high, dropped for a period of time, and then
improved again. Thus, there appears to be a mimicking (copying) phase first
and then a time of broad generalizations before children settle into language.

What are the major theories about language

acquisition?
The most well-known theory about language acquisition is the nativist
theory, which suggests that we are born with something in our genes that
allows us to learn language. It proposes that there is a theoretical language
acquisition device (LAD) somewhere in our brains that is responsible for
learning a language the same way the hypothalamus is responsible for
maintaining your body temperature. If language was partly biological, it
could explain why humans seem to have far more complicated
communication patterns than any other species .

Although no physical “language organ” exists in the brain, language

acquisition can be hampered if certain parts of the brain are damaged during
critical periods of language development. Damage to the left hemisphere, for
example can lead to aphasia - a disorder which causes problems with
language, while leaving intelligence untouched. For example, in Wernicke’s
aphasia, patients with damage in a certain region of the brain can no longer
understand language. Although they can still form normal sentences, neither
what they say nor the words of others make any sense to them. Patients with
Broca’s aphasia on the other hand, have problems forming language but no
trouble understanding what is said to them. Studies have shown that young
children with damage in similar regions of the brain can actually grow up
with only slightly impaired language ability - implying that the brain can
develop new language pathways that are good, but not quite as good as the
original (Reilly, 1998).

Nativist theory also suggests that there is a universal grammar that is shared

across differing languages, because this grammar is part of our genetic make-
up. The majority of world languages have verbs and nouns, although this is
not true in every instance, as well as similar ways to structure thoughts.
Language is thought of as having a finite amount of rules from which we can
build an infinite amount of phrases, and the core of these rules is somehow
programmed into our brains. This is an ideal theory for explaining how young
children can learn such complicated ideas so quickly, or why there are so
many similarities in language around the world. This theory is comparable to
how we think of numbers; regardless of cultural background, math always
works the same way.

Another way to look at language learning is to treat it like learning a new

skill. The learning theory of language acquisition suggests that children
learn a language much like they learn to tie their shoes or how to count;
through repetition and reinforcement. When babies first learn to babble,
parents and guardians smile, coo, and hug them for this behavior. As they
grow older, children are praised for speaking properly and corrected when
they misspeak. Thus, language arises from stimuli and stimuli response.
While this is logical, it fails to explain how new words or phrases come
about, since children are only parroting the things they have heard from
others.

The interactionist approach (sociocultural theory) combines ideas from

sociology and biology to explain how language is developed. According to
this theory, children learn language out of a desire to communicate with the
world around them. Language emerges from, and is dependent upon, social
interaction. The Interactionist approach claims that if our language ability
develops out of a desire to communicate, then language is dependent upon
whom we want to communicate with. This means the environment you grow
up in will heavily affect how well and how quickly you learn to talk. For
example, infants being raised by only their mother are more likely to learn
the word “mama”, and less likely to develop “dada”. Among the first words
we learn are ways to demand attention or food. If you’ve ever tried to learn a
new language, you may recognize this theory’s influence. Language classes
often teach commonly used vocabulary and phrases first, and then focus on
building conversations rather than simple rote memorization. Even when we
expand our vocabularies in our native language, we remember the words we
use the most.
It’s important to keep in mind that theories of language acquisition are just
ideas created by researchers to explain their observations. How accurate these
theories are to the real world is debatable. Language acquisition is a
complicated process influenced by the genetics of an individual as well as the
environment they live in.

How do scientists today study language learning?

Many of these theories initially came about as a result of what is called
“armchair psychology”; that is, sitting and thinking about a problem. It is
extremely difficult to collect objective and accurate data on what’s going on
in the brain in terms of its direct relationship to a behavior such as language.
That said, some computational models of language acquisition have been
gaining traction in the past several decades. A computational model is a
mathematical way to recreate complicated systems we see everyday; from
how water flows in a river, to how children learn languages. The model is
built to represent the way we think something happens. For example, in the
model of the learning theory approach, a word would be learned faster if it
came up a lot or the subject received a lot of input about it. Then, linguists
change how different variables work to see what affect that would have on
the system. If the model behaves and “learns” the same way that we do, it’s a
good sign that the model is on the right track. These models have helped to
identify and measure linguistical features such as the critical period for
language learning, the vocabulary burst, and the U-shaped learning
mentioned earlier.

New brain imaging technology, such as MRIs and fMRIs have also allowed
scientists to look at the brains of children and patients with language-
acquisition disorders to understand this complicated event. An fMRI can
track where and when our brains use energy. If a certain part of your brain
lights up while you’re learning a language, that part of your brain is using
energy, and in this context might be related to language-acquisition. Of
course we learn over time and not all at once, so there is a limit to what we
can learn via imaging which represents the brain in a single moment.

While we still have a ways to go before we completely understand how we

learn a language, we definitely know enough to know that it’s a pretty
incredible feat. So give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back and just
remember that the phrase “it’s so easy, a child could do it!” doesn’t always
apply.
https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/processing-the-environment/language/a/theories-of-
the-early-stages-of-language-acquisition

Transformational Grammar (TG) Definition and Examples

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms
byRichard Nordquist 
Updated July 03, 2019

Transformational grammar is a theory of grammar that accounts for the

constructions of a language by linguistic transformations and phrase structures.
Also known as transformational-generative grammar or T-G or TGG.
Following the publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures in 1957,
transformational grammar dominated the field of linguistics for the next few
decades.

 "The era of Transformational-Generative Grammar, as it is called, signifies

a sharp break with the linguistic tradition of the first half of the [twentieth]
century both in Europe and America because, having as its principal
objective the formulation of a finite set of basic and transformational rules
that explain how the native speaker of a language can generate and
comprehend all its possible grammatical sentences, it focuses mostly
on syntax and not on phonology or morphology, as structuralism does"
(Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2005).

Observations
  "The new linguistics, which began in 1957 with the publication of Noam
Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, deserves the label 'revolutionary.' After
1957, the study of grammar would no longer be limited to what is said and
how it is interpreted. In fact, the word grammar itself took on a new
meaning. The new linguistics defined grammar as our innate,
subconscious ability to generate language, an internal system of rules that
constitutes our human language capacity. The goal of the new linguistics
was to describe this internal grammar.
"Unlike the structuralists, whose goal was to examine the sentences we
actually speak and to describe their systemic nature,
the transformationalists wanted to unlock the secrets of language: to
build a model of our internal rules, a model that would produce all of the
grammatical—and no ungrammatical—sentences." (M. Kolln and R.
Funk, Understanding English Grammar. Allyn and Bacon, 1998)
 "[F]rom the word go, it has often been clear that Transformational
Grammar was the best available theory of language structure, while
lacking any clear grasp of what distinctive claims the theory made about
human language." (Geoffrey Sampson, Empirical Linguistics. Continuum,
2001)

Surface Structures and Deep Structures

 "When it comes to syntax, [Noam] Chomsky is famous for proposing that
beneath every sentence in the mind of a speaker is an invisible, inaudible
deep structure, the interface to the mental lexicon. The deep structure is
converted by transformational rules into a surface structure that
corresponds more closely to what is pronounced and heard. The rationale
is that certain constructions, if they were listed in the mind as surface
structures, would have to be multiplied out in thousands of redundant
variations that would have to have been learned one by one, whereas if the
constructions were listed as deep structures, they would be simple, few in
number, and economically learned." (Steven Pinker, Words and Rules.
Basic Books, 1999)

Transformational Grammar and the Teaching of Writing

 "Though it is certainly true, as many writers have pointed out,
that sentence-combining exercises existed before the advent
of transformational grammar, it should be evident that the
transformational concept of embedding gave sentence combining a
theoretical foundation upon which to build. By the time Chomsky and his
followers moved away from this concept, sentence combining had enough
momentum to sustain itself." (Ronald F. Lunsford, "Modern Grammar and
 Basic Writers." Research in Basic Writing: A Bibliographic Sourcebook,
ed. by Michael G. Moran and Martin J. Jacobi. Greenwood Press, 1990)

The Transformation of Transformational Grammar

 "Chomsky initially justified replacing phrase-structure grammar by arguing
that it was awkward, complex, and incapable of providing adequate
accounts of language. Transformational grammar offered a simple and
elegant way to understand language, and it offered new insights into the
underlying psychological mechanisms.
 "As the grammar matured, however, it lost its simplicity and much of its
elegance. In addition, transformational grammar has been plagued by
Chomsky's ambivalence and ambiguity regarding meaning. . . . Chomsky
continued to tinker with transformational grammar, changing the theories
and making it more abstract and in many respects more complex, until all
but those with specialized training in linguistics were befuddled. . . .
 "[T]he tinkering failed to solve most of the problems because Chomsky
refused to abandon the idea of deep structure, which is at the heart of T-G
grammar but which also underlies nearly all of its problems. Such
complaints have fueled the paradigm shift to cognitive grammar." (James
D. Williams, The Teacher's Grammar Book. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999)

 "In the years since transformational grammar was formulated, it has

gone through a number of changes. In the most recent version, Chomsky
(1995) has eliminated many of the transformational rules in previous
versions of the grammar and replaced them with broader rules, such as a
rule that moves one constituent from one location to another. It was just
this kind of rule on which the trace studies were based. Although newer
versions of the theory differ in several respects from the original, at a
deeper level they share the idea that syntactic structure is at the heart of
our linguistic knowledge. However, this view has been controversial within
linguistics." (David W. Carroll, Psychology of Language, 5th ed. Thomson
Wadsworth, 2008)

https://www.thoughtco.com/transformational-grammar-1692557