PSY100Y5 Study Guide - Final Guide: Language Acquisition Device, B. F. Skinner, Connectionism
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PSY100Y5 Full Course Notes
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B. f skinner argued that environmental factors govern language development. Skinner argued that children learn language the same way they learn everything else: through imitation, reinforcement, and other established principles of conditioning. By controlling reinforcement, parents encourage their children to learn the correct meaning and pronunciation of words. Children learn how to construct sentences by imitating the sentences of adults and older children. Chomsky pointed out that there are infinite number of sentences in language and therefore it is unreasonable to expect that children learn language by imitation. According to chomsky, children learn the rules of language, not specific verbal responses, as. Nativist theory proposes that humans are equipped with a language acquisition device (lad), that is an innate mechanism or process that facilitates the learning of language. Language development is determined by biological maturation more than personal experience. Nativist theories have been undermined by evidence that parents do provide their children with subtle corrective feeding about grammar.
