Limitations

There are limitations with regards to the theory of behaviorism as it concerns language acquisition and development. Owens (2005) states that the chief opponent to Skinner and his theory is Chomsky. Chomsky, an important psycholinguistic theorist, is responsible for formulating the limitations that will be discussed. This argument took place in the form of a book review published in 1959 when Chomsky reviewed Skinner’s (1957) text, Verbal Behavior.

The first limitation has to do with reinforcement. It is not physically possible for every piece of language spoken by a child to be reinforced (positively or negatively) by an adult. How can a child acquire and develop enough language then when the cycle of modeling, imitation, practice, and reinforcement is not constantly occurring?

Another limitation is related to the first. Imitation has to do with the copying of an adult model. What if that adult model is one of less than ideal speech? How is a child supposed to copy a model that is marked with various types of linguistic issues?

Syntactic or grammatical development is also an issue. A child would not hear every possible form of a word and possible order of words in a sentence from a model speaker of the home language. How then would a child have the ability to use words in multiple forms and compose sentences of varying lengths and complexities? There is also the issue of previously unspoken language. How can the introduction of new language be explained when a child speaks something novel, previously unspoken by someone in the child’s verbal language community? In addition, children utter language not used at all by adults. If all language is operant or learned, how can this be explained?

Finally, content or form as opposed to function is an issue too. Skinner discusses function to a large extent but content as form is ignored. It does not seem to matter what is being said, just how it is being said. In addition, content here also has to do with underlying meaning and what a child knows already in relation to a speech act (background or prior knowledge). This knowledge seems immaterial to Skinner. Would a child not take into account what she or he already knows when verbalizing with another? Could not that verbalization create new knowledge that could be used in a continuance of the conversation?

A consideration of the questions listed above most likely will result in some confusion over the usefulness of behaviorist theory to explain the acquisition and development of language in children. Something is definitely missing here. See the “Reactions” section for more on this discussion.