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 any 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.