BEHAVIORIST THEORY. You are probably familiar with behaviorism as a major
learning theory emphasizing stimulus, response, and reinforcement as the basic
elements of learning. For language acquisition, behaviorists hypothesized that children
learned their first language through stimulus, response, and reinforcement as
well, postulating imitation and association as essential processes. For example, to
learn the word ball, the child would first associate the word ball with the familiar
spherical object, the stimulus. Next the child would produce the word by imitation,
at which time an adult would praise the child for saying ball, thereby reinforcing
the child’s correct verbal response. Behaviorists assumed that the child’s mind was a
tabula rasa, a blank mental slate awaiting the scripture of experience.
Behaviorist concepts of imitation and reinforcement could not account for
typical child utterances like “Him don’t say it right,” which were clearly not
imitations of adult speech. Moreover, behaviorists could not explain how a 47
novel utterance was produced, even those that were grammatically correct. Yet
most utterances we produce in conversation or writing are in fact original. That
is, they are not pat phrases we have learned by hearing and repeating. In addition,
child language researchers noticed that parents typically reinforce their
children for the meaning of their utterances, not for grammatical correctness.
These and other concerns were boldly pointed out as Noam Chomsky (1957)
engaged in a heated debate with behaviorist B. F. Skinner (1957), attacking
behaviorist theory as inadequate to explain observations of child language
development.