skinner vs. Chomsky - another approach to Skinnerian theory

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
1

I think I can resurrect a Skinnerian perspective of language acquisition (as opposed to a Chomskyan perspective).

The weakness with the Skinnerian perspective was with the type of reinforcement Skinner proposed. He proposed that children learn to use words after experiencing the praise and celebration of parents and other elders. When a child randomly vocalizes a sound, which to him/her is an utterance of nonsense, gets reinforced by parents making a huge deal out of it, saying things like “oh, good boy Timmy!” or “Oh my God, listen to what Dorothy just said!”, and following up with smiles, hugs, tickles, and other forms of play, the child learns that making those sounds is preceded by these sorts of pleasurable experiences. That’s how children pick up on speech, Skinner says.

Then Chomsky came along with his list of inconsistencies and counter-evidence against the Skinnerian perspective, one of which in particular was the fact that around the world, in several cultures (primarily in tribal societies), parents don’t reward their children with praise and approval over the child’s first words. They could care less. Yet the child learns to speak at the same rate and around the same age as children in western society. This point, along with all his other attacks, more or less marked the downfall of the Skinnerian view (maybe “downfall” is a strong word, but the Skinnerian view certainly lost its momentum).

However, what if Skinner presented this proposal as the type of reinforcement that conditioned children to learn language? That children learn to speak when they make the association between uttering words and the results that they get as a consequence. For example, a child learns to utter the word “candy”. All of a sudden, his/her parents are handing him a lollipop. Or the child utters the word “up”, and lo and behold he/she gets picked up. This result can occur regardless of whether or not the parents make a huge hullabaloo about it. The parents might hold an expressionless and emotionally void demeanor, but so long as they reacts to such utterances in such a way that child ends up getting what he/she wants, that can be so much more of a reinforcement that praise and celebration ever could. Imagine the sudden realization that using specific vocalized sounds gets you exactly what you want so much more efficiently that crying or begging with the more generic sound “aaah, aaah, aaah”. The child learns to speak because of the sudden realization of the use towards which language can be put, not because he/she gets gold stars and pats on the head by bigger people.

Such a realization can have a dramatic effect on, not only children, but anyone in the more general sense. That is, when one realizes the use towards which a certain behavior can be put - that is, the beneficial consequences that come back when such behavior is applied - one is very prone to engage in that behavior with all the focus and drive that one can muster up, putting so much energy into learning the new skills required if necessary. A perfect example of this is the tendency for children to pick up on computer skills in absolutely no time. They absorb such skills like sponges. Why? Because they come to see all the power and utility that can be enjoyed if only they learned such skills. They don’t receive praise and reward from others simply for tapping at the keyboard or moving the mouse around in circles while poking at the buttons; rather, they are reinforced for the fact that doing this results in hours of fun playing video games, or finding cool stuff on the net, or talking to their friends on MSN, etc. They learn to use computers so quickly because of the enormous amount of power, creativity, and fun they experience when they handling them in the right way. The motivation to learn is there when the usefulness of learning is made evident.

Why couldn’t learning language be explained in the same Skinnarian manner?

2

I agree, but your arguement is based on a basic thing known about people, they adapt to using certain actions that give beneficial results.

I don’t think this will give skinnerian theory it’s momentum as that theory was centered on the whole praise affection and enjoyable experiances being the trigger, so no.

3

Yes, it is pretty basic, but then I wonder why the debates between Skinner and Chomsky never touched upon this. It seemed that, for a while, throughout the 50s and 60s, Skinnerian theory of language acquisition dominated, but then got pushed asside by Chomsky’s view that learning language had nothing to do with being reinforced for uttering sounds. It seems as though this basic fact about how people learn should have been introduced as a workable compromise between the two views.

No, I don’t think so either, but only because we’ve moved beyond Skinner primarily due to Chomsky’s rival ideas. What I do believe is that Skinnerian theory could have carried the day when these two theories were first debated if only it had reconsidered the type of reinforcement proposed - namely, that children learn to speak when they see how useful it can be to get what they want.

4

I think Skinner went beyond what you are proposing to claim that the contingencies of reinforcement explained language acquistion itself. If you feed a pigeon bird seed when it flies to you, it is more likely to fly to you again. But a pigeon is probably going to fly whether you reinforce it or not. Likewise you may be able to modify language acquistion to a certain extent via reinforcement. But language acquisition isn’t explainable solely in terms of operant conditioning.

5

Well Chomsky invented his ‘language acquisition devise’. The inherent and intrinsic ability that allows us to learn language. Chomsky claimed that language was too complicated to be merely learned via the Skinnerian way.