对于布卢姆菲尔德来说，语言学是实证主义心理学品牌的一个分支，被称为“行为主义”。当行为主义方法论通过布鲁姆菲尔德的著作进入语言学时，语言学研究中的流行做法是接受以英语为母语的人所说的话，而摒弃他所说的话。这是因为人们认为，基于对说话者未经研究的话语的观察，语言描述是可靠的；如果分析师诉诸演讲者的问题，例如“您可以用您的语言说……吗？”，这是不可靠的。For Bloomfield, linguistics is a branch of the positivistic brand of psychology known as “behaviorism”. When the behaviorist methodology entered linguistics via Bloomfield’ s writings, the popular practice in linguistic studies was to accept what a native speaker says in his language and to discard what he says about it. This is because of the belief that a linguistic description was reliable when based on observation of unstudied utterances by speakers; it was unreliable if the analyst had resorted to asking speakers questions such as “Can you say ... in your language?”