LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT-BEHAVIOURISM

Behaviorism (also called learning perspective) is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors. The school of psychology maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind. Behaviorism comprises the position that all theories should have observational correlates but that there are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions) and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling).

From early psychology in the 19th century, the behaviorist school of thought ran concurrently and shared commonalities with the psychoanalytic and Gestalt movements in psychology into the 20th century; but also differed from the mental philosophy of the Gestalt psychologists in critical ways. Its main influences were Ivan Pavlov, who investigated classical conditioning, Edward Lee Thorndike, John B. Watson who rejected introspective methods and sought to restrict psychology to experimental methods, and B.F. Skinner who conducted research on operant conditioning.

Relation to language

As Skinner turned from experimental work to concentrate on the philosophical underpinnings of a science of behavior, his attention naturally turned to human language. His book Verbal Behavior (1957) laid out a vocabulary and theory for functional analysis of verbal behavior. The book was strongly criticized in a review by the linguist Noam Chomsky.[1] Skinner did not himself respond in detail; he claimed that "[Chomsky] doesn’t know what I am talking about and for some reason is unable to understand it".[2] A thorough refutation was written by Kenneth McCorquodale [1] [3] and submitted to Language but was refused and later printed in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior.

What was important for a behaviorist analysis of human behavior was not language acquisition so much as the interaction between language and overt behavior. In an essay republished in his 1969 book Contingencies of Reinforcement, Skinner took the view that humans could construct linguistic stimuli that would then acquire control over their behavior in the same way that external stimuli could. The possibility of such "instructional control" over behavior meant that contingencies of reinforcement would not always produce the same effects on human behavior as they reliably do in other animals. The focus of a radical behaviorist analysis of human behavior therefore shifted to an attempt to understand the interaction between instructional control and contingency control, and also to understand the behavioral processes that determine what instructions are constructed and what control they acquire over behavior. Important figures in this effort have been Murray Sidman, A. Charles Catania, C. Fergus Lowe and Steven C. Hayes.