Behaviorist’s psychologists, who are scientific descendants of Locke, consider that language is a behavior to be learnt just like other behaviors. Behaviorists believe that their caregivers shape sounds made by infants until the sounds become words. If the children imitate adult words and receive appropriate reinforcement, then the words should be retained and then used again in the right circumstances.
Skinner was a Behavioral Psychologist and was unconcerned with any
`underlying mental processes' that may have been occurring during
learning. He believed that because these were unobservable they were fictitious. Instead he was concerned with the observable materialistic nature of
behavior. He felt that there was no ‘underlying’ meaning to words
and that verbal behavior was due to the conditioning that occurs
between the words and the reinforcement properties of a stimulus.
According to skinner (1985) “Verbal behavior evidently came into existence when, through a critical step in the evolution of the human species, the vocal musculature became susceptible to operant conditioning.”
An example of this would be when trying to teach a dog a new trick you must first persuade the dog to do the trick and then reward it with either approval or food. If you keep doing this, eventually the dog will learn the trick. Much of real life is like this: responses are learned because they operant on or affect the environment. Referred to as operant conditioning.
A baby left alone in a crib may kick, twist and coo spontaneously in a room but the chances of this happening again depends on its consequences. The baby will coo more often if each such occurrence is followed by parent attention. ‘If we think of the baby as having a goal of parental attention, then operant conditioning amounts to learning that a particular behavior leads to attaining a particular goal.’ (Rescorla, 1987).
Via operant conditioning, behaviorists such as Skinner have shown that techniques of positive reinforcement shape the repertoires of individual behaviors; reinforcement of appropriate grammar and language would therefore lead to a child's acquisition of language and grammar.
Skinner's explanation of language was that any acquisition was due to a learning process involving the shaping of grammar into a correct form by the re-enforcement of other stimulus. Correct grammar is positively reinforced and will be used in the future, and incorrect grammar is negatively reinforced and will be not be used again. His model of this is shown below.
One form of positive reinforcement is the child getting what it asks for. For example, ‘May I have some water?’ produces a drink that reinforces that form of words. Reinforcement ay also be given by parents becoming excited and poking, touching, patting and feeding children when they vocalize.
Skinner’s Model of Language Learning
Correct Word Combos
Word-like Sound Combinations
Language sounds Non-Word Combinations
Babbled Sounds Non-Word Combinations
Non-Language Sounds
Shaping through selective reinforcement narrows the range of babbled sounds, later produces the first words, and finally the first multi-word utterances.
Guess et al 1968 taught a mentally retarded girl to make correct grammatical utterances using positive reinforcement of praise and food.
Their studies on adults giving reinforcement for certain nouns and plurals, found an increase in an occurrence of correct responses, if `praise' was issued.
On the other hand, there are problems with Skinner's learning account. Perhaps the most challenging problem for the learning model is to explain where the child's novel utterances come from: How can the child speak anything she has not already heard someone else say, if all her utterances arise through reinforcement?
An alternative to learning and imitation is the psycholinguistic model, associated with Chomsky and Lenneberg (though contributed to by many). Comsky criticized Skinner. He believed reinforcement plays a minor role in language development. He claimed that Skinner failed to state how syntactic rules are acquired. Syntactic rules provide us with information about how words can be used in a sentence. Chomsky wonders how children master these rules of grammar. Learning a language involves the acquisition of a body of knowledge.
According to Chomsky such knowledge is best described as a set of rules or principles. The Syntactic rules are very complex and yet all children acquire them naturally. We cannot instruct a child to learn a language in which we cannot communicate to them with.
As a result of this query he suggests that the human brain is specialized to acquire language, and contains an innate LAD (Learning Acquisition Devise). It enables children to process linguistic data selectively from their environment and this helps them to generate rules of grammar, from this they can generate a language.
Chomsky’s theory explains why children can build sentences that have never been heard before in a complex and grammatically correct way. For example ‘The big fat cow run over the road and arrested me’ This type of sentence is unlikely to have been heard before from anyone but can still be said grammatically correctly.
More evidence to back up Chomsk’s theory is that children all around the world seem to develop speech at around the same time, and so suggests again that children have an innate learning system. If children didn’t have this then it is suggested that children from different countries and cultures would develop at different times because of the way they are talked to and brought up, though this is not the way.
The detailed and vast nature of language, the difficulty in collecting empirical data during child language acquisition and the fact that language touches on so many areas of Psychology, make validation of Chomsky and Skinner's theories, and any language theories, particularly difficult.
However looking at the evidence that has been collected, it seems understandable to accept different parts of each theory.
