Language Learning - Skinner: Language Acquisition in Children - Behaviorist View of Language Acquisition – Imitation (Skinner)

Behaviorist View of Language Acquisition – Imitation (Skinner)

·         This school of psychology believes that mental states are unspecific and all behavior can be explained as stimulus and response relations.

·         Learning is produced by rewarding or punishing the results of the active behavior of a human or any other organism as it interacts with the environment. According to him Reinforcement is a stimulus that increases the probability of a desired response.

·         Behaviorists did their experiments with animals and concluded that they could be taught various tasks by encouraging habit formation. This can be done by rewarding the desirable behavior (Positive Reinforcement) and taking away the desirable behavior or object (Negative Reinforcement)

Skinners’ Theory of Language Acquisition

In Verbal Behavior (1957) Skinner stated, ‘

"The basic processes and relations which give verbal behavior its special characteristics are now fairly well understood.  Much of the experimental work responsible for this advance has been carried out on other species, but the results have proved to be surprisingly free of species restrictions.  Recent work has shown that the methods can be extended to human behaviour without serious modifications." (cited in Lowe and Graham, 1998, p68)

Imitation Theory:

·         Main Proponent : B. F.Skinner

·         It is Behaviorist View on Language learning based on an empirical or behavioral approach

·         Language is learnt through Imitation a process of imitation, and reinforcement

·         Language is learnt through

·         Children start out as clean slates and language learning is process of getting linguistic habits printed on these slates

·         Language Acquisition is a process of experience

·         Language is a ‘conditioned behavior’: and is built upon the stimulus response process Feedback of Stimulus Response is Reinforcement which decides whether the language will be learnt or not.   Positive Reinforcement will motivates repetition i.e. language acquisition and negative reinforcement will discourage repetition

Thus, Children learn language step by step by Imitation, Repetition, Memorization, controlled drilling and Reinforcement

Popular View

·         Children learn to speak by imitating the words and noises heard around them and their analogy.

·         Children strengthen their responses by the repetitions, corrections, and other reactions that adults provide, thus language is practice based

·         General perception is that there is no difference between the way one learns a language and the way one learns to do anything else

·         Main focus is on inducing the child to behave with the help of mechanical drills and exercises

·          Learning is controlled by the conditions under which it take place and that, as long as individual are subjected on the same condition, they will learn in the same condition

Skinner: Language Acquisition in Children

According to Skinner the child imitates the language of its parents and the persons who are around him. An adult who recognizes a word spoken by a child will praise the child and/or give it what it is asking for. Therefore successful utterances are reinforced during the process of rewarding (response/smile /food etc.) while unsuccessful ones are forgotten.

According to Skinner the main principle of operant conditioning is reinforcement.

B.F. Skinner (1938) coined the term operant conditioning; it means roughly changing of behaviour by the use of reinforcement which is given after the desired response. Skinner identified three types of responses or operant that can follow behaviour.[1]

• Neutral operant: responses from the environment that neither increase nor decrease the probability of a behavior being repeated.

• Reinforcers: Responses from the environment that increase the probability of a behavior being repeated. Reinforcers can be either positive or negative.

• Punishers: Responses from the environment that decrease the likelihood of a behavior being repeated. Punishment weakens behavior.

Reinforcement is the process in which a behaviour is strengthened, and thus, more likely to happen again. Positive Reinforcement is making behaviour stronger by following the behaviour with a pleasant stimulus.   For example, a rat presses a lever and receives food. Negative Reinforcement is making behaviour stronger by taking away a negative stimulus. For example, a rat presses a lever and turns off the electric shock.

Skinner applied his theory of operant conditioning in explaining the language acquisition process of a child.

Skinner viewed babies as ‘empty vessels’ in which language had to be ‘put in to’. He said children learn language from their environment and consequences of their actions (a nurture view of language).

According to Skinner

·         A child learns language through positive reinforcement. His basic explanation for the development of speech was that parents tend to reward infant vocalizations (such as babbling) by giving their attention to the infant. This reward which according to him is reinforcement increases the frequency of vocalization. He would suggest that the child will not progress from babbling to language unless the parent’s shape the child’s language behaviour.

He further argues that after rewarding vocalizations for a while, parents become used to a child’s babbling and pay less attention to it. This motivates the infant to vary the babbling. Sometimes, by accident, the child produces more recognizable speech sounds e.g. if an infant suddenly said ‘Dadadada’, parents might respond excitedly to this, thinking that the child is trying to say the word ‘Daddy’. The response reinforces the child’s production of this type of speech sound. Other sounds that are less like actual speech tend to be ignored. However, parents soon get bored by repetitions of ‘Dadadada’, and this motivates the child to modify such sounds until the shaping process results in recognizable words.

This process continues, resulting in sentences of increasing complexity and grammatical correctness. In addition, the use of language is rewarded when a child asks for something and as a result, succeeds in getting it. Skinner did not claim that parents intentionally set out to shape the language development of infants, but that this happens naturally.

·         Children imitate speech sounds and words spoken by caregivers and, provided this imitation is rewarded, learning will take place. This is how children learn new words. However, this theory assumes that without reinforcement, imitation will not result in learning.

Criticism of Skinner Theory of Language Acquisition

The theory of language acquisition by Skinner is criticized on the basis of certain evidences that children produce during language acquisition. While there must be some truth in Skinner's explanation, there are many objections to it. Some of them are presented here:

·         Language is based on a set of structures or rules, which could not be worked out simply by imitating individual utterances. The mistakes made by children reveal that they are not simply imitating but actively working out and applying rules.  For example, a child who says "drinked" instead of "drank" is not copying an adult but rather over-applying a rule.  The child has discovered that past tense verbs are formed by adding a /d/ or /t/ sound to the base form.  The "mistakes" occur because there are irregular verbs which do not behave in this way.  Such forms are often referred to as intelligent mistakes or virtuous errors.

·         The vast majority of children go through the same stages of language acquisition.  There appears to be a definite sequence of steps.  We refer to developmental milestones.  Apart from certain extreme cases the sequence seems to be largely unaffected by the treatment the child receives or the type of society in which s/he grows up.

·         Children are often unable to repeat what an adult says, especially if the adult utterance contains a structure the child has not yet started to use.  The classic demonstration comes from the American psycholinguist David McNeill.  The structure in question here involves negating verbs:

Child: Nobody don't like me

Mother: No, say, "Nobody likes me."

Child: Nobody don't like me.

(Eight repetitions of this dialogue)

Mother:  No, now listen carefully: say, "Nobody likes me."

Child: Oh! Nobody don't likes me.

(McNeil in The Genesis of Language, 1966)

·         Parents are more interested in politeness and truthfulness rather than correct grammar. Only few parents tend to say explicit grammatical correction.  According to Brown, Cazden and Bellugi (1969):  "It seems to be truth value rather than well-formed syntax that chiefly governs explicit verbal reinforcement by parents - which renders mildly paradoxical the fact that the usual product of such a training schedule is an adult whose speech is highly grammatical but not notably truthful."  (cited in Lowe and Graham, 1998)

·         There is evidence for a critical period for language acquisition.  Children who have not acquired language by the age of about seven will never entirely catch up.  The most famous example is that of Genie, discovered in 1970 at the age of 13. She had been severely neglected, brought up in isolation and deprived of normal human contact.  Of course, she was disturbed and underdeveloped in many ways.  During subsequent attempts at rehabilitation, her carers tried to teach her to speak.  Despite some success, mainly in learning vocabulary, she never became a fluent speaker, failing to acquire the grammatical competence of the average five-year-old.

·         While encountering irregular items, there is a stage when they replace forms based on the regular patterns of language automatically and gradually switch over to the process of ‘analogy’ as they start working out the language for themselves. Analogy is a reasoning process and cannot be attributed to imitation. 

·         Secondly it appears that children sometimes are unable to imitate adult grammatical constructions exactly. They speak what they infer as right. Thus, language acquisition is more a matter of maturation than of imitation.

·         Some parents pay very little attention to the vocalization of their infants; still the children are able to develop language.

·         Shaping as described by behaviorist is a very lengthy process, whereas a child’s language development, particularly during the second year of life is rapid

·         The theory assumes that imitation without reinforcement will not lead to learning (explain Bandura’s theory of language to show that this is unlikely)

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[1] http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html