Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English

Psycholinguistics : First Language Acquisition Theories _Behaviorist/Learning

(1/1)

Md. Mostafa Rashel:
First Language Acquisition Theories: Behaviorist/Learning Theory

Theoretician(s):
•   Watson (Psychologist)
•   Pavlov
•   B.F. Skinner
•   Albert Bandura
•   Charles Osgood

Development, Hypotheses and assumptions

Watson(1913), behavior could be explained in terms of observable acts that could be described by stimulus-response sequences

Hypothesis:
Language is acquired according to the general laws of learning and is similar to any other learned behavior.
•   Classical conditioning
•   Operant conditioning
•   Social learning (There is a mediator between the stimulus and response: the human mind.
•   Osgood's mediation theory (though Osgood places his theory in the behavioristic paradigm, his theory is based partly on cognitivism and innativism for a number of reasons)


Pitfalls:

•   Novel utterances which have never been heard by children
•   Lacking of some categories in production (e.g. function words)
•   No explanation for the logical problem of first language acquisition.

REFERENCES
Gleason and Ratner (1998). Psycholinguistics. Second Edition. Forth Worth: Harcourt Brace Collage Publishers.
Keenan and Comrie (1977). "Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar." Linguistic inquiry.8 (1), 63-99.

Antara11:
I really like giving example from Skinner's operant conditioning while teaching this theory.

Thanks.

Navigation

[0] Message Index