Behaviourism and Language Acquisition

Methodological Behaviourism: Focuses on observable and measurable behavior and physical causes rather than private introspection.
Psychological Behaviourism: Attributes behavior to physical forces in the body and environment instead of mental activity.
Radical Behaviourism: Reduces the mind to the body, viewing thoughts and feelings as physical processes.
Roots: Originates from British Empiricism ( $Locke$ , $Hume$ ), focusing on physical stimuli and responses.

Reflexes: $Pavlov$ demonstrated that while some reflexes are natural, others can be conditioned and contingent.
Skinner's View: Influenced by the idea that human behavior is reducible to stimuli-response patterns, suggesting free will is an illusion.
Counter-evidence: Recent $EEG$ studies indicate that individuals can voluntarily control brain states.

Womb to $6$ Months: The "sensitive period" where children differentiate sounds of any language.
$6$ Months: Babbling begins with the opening of the vocal tract.
$1$ Year: Typically produces $1$ or $2$ words.
$2$ Years: Vocabulary of at least $50$ words and simple word combinations.
$3$ Years: Rapid vocabulary expansion and understanding of abstract concepts like "now" or "sad."
Age $7$ : The "critical period" ends, after which language acquisition capacity is significantly reduced.

Nurture-based: View that language is acquired entirely through environment and reinforcement.
Mechanism: Children learn through imitation and $positive$ and $negative$ reinforcement ( $reward$ and $punishment$ ).
Tabula Rasa: The brain is considered a blank slate shaped by linguistic stimuli.

Poverty of Stimulus Argument: Refutes $Skinner$ by noting children learn complex structures from limited or imperfect examples faster than reinforcement allows.
Active Learning: Children apply grammatical rules to new words (e.g., "gived") rather than just imitating.
Language-Acquisition Device (LAD): An innate neural faculty evolved specifically for applying linguistic rules.
Creole Evidence: The development of $Creole$ from ungrammatical $pidgin$ over generations supports the existence of innate grammar structures.

Universal Features: $Chomsky$ argues all languages share basic rules, such as the distinction between $nouns$ and $verbs$ .
Recursion: The ability to repeat structures indefinitely (e.g., "I know that you know that I know"), which $Chomsky$ considered a universal feature.
Challenges: The $Piranha$ language is cited as a counter-example because it does not allow recursion, questioning the universality of $Chomsky$ 's theories.