Behavioral Theory
Behavioral theory in linguistics focuses on the idea that language is learned through imitation, reinforcement, and conditioning. It emphasizes observable behaviors and the role of the environment in shaping language acquisition. This theory suggests that language development is influenced by external factors and interactions, rather than solely by internal cognitive processes.
5 Key excerpts on "Behavioral Theory"
eBook - ePubLanguage and Literacy for the Early Years
9780857257413
- Sally Neaum(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Learning Matters(Publisher)
...Language learning is understood in the same way as all other learned behaviours: a process of stimulus and response. In this theory language is learned and shaped through external reinforcement. It is understood as small steps towards speaking encouraged through responses from other people. For example, a child babbles ‘mamamama’ and the response from parents and other adults assumes that this is an attempt at saying ‘mummy’, and they demonstrate their delight at this. This delight acts as positive reinforcement which encourages the child to repeat that sound and to engage in the dynamic of making sounds and receiving positive feedback. The child is seen as relatively passive in this process in that other people determine what the child learns through reinforcing the behaviours that they wish to continue. A behaviourist understanding of language learning was, in its time, in line with other explanations of how humans learn. It emerged as part of the behaviourist school of psychology through the work of theorists such as Pavlov, Watson, Thorndike and Skinner. Their work was predominantly experimental laboratory work with a focus on how animals and humans behave rather than how they think or feel. In their experiments they showed that they were able to influence behaviour by linking a stimulus to a response. A behaviourist approach understands language learning in the same way: children produce ‘language behaviours’, other people respond, and this creates a stimulus-response dynamic which moulds and shapes the child’s language. ACTIVITY 1 Read these sentences. I goed to the shop. I drinked my drink. I saw three mouses. In each of these sentences are words that young children are very unlikely to have heard but occur in their speech. What are the implications for a behaviourist explanation of language acquisition? Critics suggest that behaviourism has limitations in fully explaining how children learn, and learn to use, our complex language system...
eBook - ePubCognitive Psychology and Information Processing
An Introduction
- R. Lachman, J. L. Lachman, E. C. Butterfield(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...After briefly reviewing both earlier approaches to language, we examine what he put in their place and why. II. Neobehavioristic and Information-Theory Approaches to Language One of the most remarkable aspects of the first 60 or 70 years of American experimental psychology is how little concern it gave to language. Pavlov, who discovered the conditioned reflex, thought that the principles of conditioning would help explain how language is used (Pavlov, 1927), and there was some Russian experimentation toward that end (e.g., Volkova, 1953). But language fell largely in the cracks between the subdisciplines of American psychology. Gestalt psychologists studied perceptual and memory organization. Verbal-learning psychologists studied rote acquisition, and from their viewpoint, natural language habits were sources of contamination to be eliminated from their experiments. Neobehaviorists viewed language as a complex configuration of the simple processes they studied in the animal laboratory, and, before 1950, accounting for language seemed to them a job for the future. A. Neobehaviorist Accounts By the mid-1950s, the neobehaviorist paradigm was relatively complete, optimism ran high, and conditioning theory seemed ready for extension to new problems. It seemed that the time had come when tasks previously left for the future might be profitably addressed. Here, we provide only a few examples to give the flavor of the neobehaviorists' extensions of their theories to language. Staats and Staats (1963) provide a superb and much longer account of the various aspects of language that were addressed from a neobehavioristic point of view, including speech development, semantic differentiation of word meanings, acquisition of word meanings, and word associations, grammar, and communication, among other things. 1. Classical Conditioning Osgood (1953) provided one account of how word meanings might be learned by classical conditioning which was extended by Staats and Staats (1963)...
eBook - ePub- Kirsten Malmkjaer, Kirsten Malmkjaer(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...B Behaviourist linguistics The psychological theory known as behaviourism was founded by J.B. Watson (1924). Its main tenet is that all of what some people refer to as mental activity (including language use) can be explained in terms of habit formation, or patterns of stimulus and response, built up through conditioning. These patterns of behaviour are an organism’s output ; the conditioning through which they have been formed are the input to the organism. Both the input and the output to the organism are observable phenomena, so behaviourism was well suited to the strong current of empiricism that swept the scientific communities in the USA and Britain early in the twentieth century. In linguistics, one of the finest examples of the empiricist/behaviourist tradition is Leonard Bloomfield’s Language (1933/1935), although the most rigorous application of behaviourist theory to the study of language is probably Verbal Behavior (1957), by Burrhus Frederic Skinner, one of the most famous behaviourist psychologists of the twentieth century. This book was severely criticised by Chomsky (1959). In Language, Bloomfield insists that a scientific theory of language must reject all data that are not directly observable or physically measurable. A scientific theory should be able to make predictions, but Bloomfield points out that (1935: 33): We could foretell a person’s actions (for instance, whether a certain stimulus will lead him to speak, and, if so, the exact words he will utter) only if we knew the exact structure of his body at that moment, or, what comes to the same thing, if we knew the exact make-up of his organism at some early stage – say at birth or before – and then had a record of every change in that organism, including every stimulus that had ever affected the organism. Language, according to Bloomfield, is a substitute for action...
eBook - ePubLanguage As Social Action
Social Psychology and Language Use
- Thomas M. Holtgraves(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...This fact both shapes the nature of the activity—people must coordinate with others in order to understand and to be understood (Clark, 1996a)—and its consequences—linguistic actions affect how interactants think and feel about each other. There are many disciplines that have been concerned with language as social action. For example, philosophers, computer scientists, and microsociologists have treated language in this way, and psychologists have provided empirical tests of some of their ideas. The role of context, or the structural properties of talk, have been described in detail by conversation analysts, most of whom would be considered anthropologists or microsociologists. The interpersonal implications of language use have been the focus of research conducted by anthropologists, sociolinguists, and communication scholars, whereas research on language and thought has been undertaken primarily by psychologists and anthropologists. Perspective taking and coordination have been studied most extensively by psychologists, although conversation analysts have made some important contributions here as well. In this book I will draw from these different orientations and disciplines. But the overarching approach taken here is primarily social psychological. It is a social psychological perspective in the sense that language will be viewed as a behavior that is both influenced by other people, as well as a means for influencing the behavior of others. How we talk—what we try to do with language—is extremely sensitive to the social context. What we say and how we say it is influenced by our perceptions of our interlocutors, what they can be presumed to know, our relationship with them, and so on. But at the same time, when we use language we alter the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of others...
eBook - ePubPrimary English Teaching
An Introduction to Language, Literacy and Learning
- Robyn Cox, Robyn Cox(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 1 EXPLORING LANGUAGE AND LEARNING ROBYN COX How do we learn language? Is it the same as how we learn to walk or how we learn to do mathematics? These are the questions that characterize the long theoretical journey by researchers and thinkers which produced the theories of language acquisition which underlie much of the pedagogy of the primary English literacy classroom today. The first section of this chapter outlines the three main language acquisition theories that emerged early in the twentieth century: the behaviourist theory of language acquisition; the cognitivist theory of language acquisition; and the sociocultural theory of language acquisition. Behaviourist theory of language acquisition Early work by B.F. Skinner identified that all learning is a result of stimulus response and that people will learn when they are rewarded for their efforts. This grew out of experiments with animals and a growing knowledge of physiology and neural work, and proved to be an adequate explanation for language acquisition and language learning. During this period a number of questions were raised about this view of language learning. Those questions focused on the particularity of humans to learn language so efficiently and if it was as simple as stimulus–response then why could not animals learn to talk. So began a series of experiments across the world to try to teach those animals with physiology similar to that of humans, such as the ape family, and, most famously, chimpanzees, to speak. Many famous experiments were conducted into primate language research, in particular with chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. However, because non-human primates lack vocal cords and other human speech organs, the experiments often utilized primates’ manual dexterity and had them operate keyboards. It is now generally accepted that apes can learn to sign and are able to communicate with humans. However, it is disputed as to whether they can form syntax to manipulate such signs...
