Acquisition, learning, or development of language? Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" revisited.
In 1957, Skinner, in his "Verbal Behavior", proposed an explanation on how a language is learned. In 1959, Chomsky strongly argued the non-learnability of language, establishing in the field of developmental psycholinguistics the substitution of the term "learning" for that of "acquisition". Currently, the constructivist models describe language acquisition as a process of ontogenetic, gradual, complex, and adaptive change. This new theoretical framework has been especially useful for rereading Verbal Behavior because it facilitates recovering the Skinnerian learning mechanisms. This can be observed in the recent research trends that recapture reinforcement and imitation (echoic responses), although they are now located in the initial phases of the process and are included in a cognitive dynamic that, by gradually increasing its complexity, can achieve grammar. The new constructivist theoretical framework, by retrieving the functional and referential aspects of language, can also take advantage of the classic Skinnerian proposal about the pragmatic types of verbal behavior, providing it with new meaning.
López Ornat
Susana
S
Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. slornat@psi.ucm.es
Gallo
Pilar
P
D001527:Behaviorism / Q000266:history*; D003071:Cognition; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014706:Verbal Learning