Skinner's operant conditioning/behavioural theory for how children learn language

Skinner's operant conditioning/behavioural theory for how children learn language

Skinner came up with the idea of positive and negative reinforcement and how this leads to behaviours being learned. Skinner viewed babies as 'empty vessels' which needed to be 'put into'.

Early in the baby's life, an example of positive reinforcement will be attention given to the baby when they babble, this will increase the frequency in the amount of times they babble, leading to increased vocalisation.  

 After rewarding vocalisations for a while, parents become used to a child’s babbling and pay less attention to it. This motivates the infant to vary the babbling. Sometimes, by accident, the child produces more recognisable speech sounds, for example, if an infant accidentally says 'dada', the parents might respond excitedly (positive reinforcement). Therefore, skinner did not claim that parents intentionally shape the language of children but that it happens naturally.

Later in the child's development thought that when a child said a word correctly they were positively reinforced. For example, when the child says ‘milk’ and the mother will smile and give her some as a result, the child will find this outcome rewarding, enhancing the child's language development (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011).






However, this theory assumes that without reinforcement, imitation will not result in learning. Brown and Hanlon's case study shows that during parent-child conversations, parents rarely reinforce correct grammar in a child's speech. But instead focus on truthfulness and accuracy of statements.