Compare behaviorist and nativist explanations for language development. What are the basic arguments of each position? What evidence is there supporting each position?

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The Answer is The answer should include the following information: (1) Behaviorist explanations of language development focus on the role of operant conditioning in shaping and maintaining language. The main argument is that language use, similar to any other behavior, gets shaped and reinforced in the environment. As such, eventually a vocabulary of words and a repertoire of sentences and phrases develop; (2) The nativist position argues that language development is an innate, biological capacity. According to this view, human brains are equipped with a language acquisition device, which facilitates language learning, especially within critical periods of development: (3) Although the behaviorist account offers a simple, intuitive explanation for language development, there is very little research evidence to support it. In fact, there are at least three forms of evidence that argue very strongly against a behaviorist interpretation. First, parents don't spend much time teaching their children to speak grammatically, suggesting that direct reinforcement of phrases and sentences doesn't occur very often. Second, children can generate many more grammatical sentences than they ever hear. This suggests that a small set of rules (perhaps innate) is responsible for language production, instead of the piecemeal reinforcement of individual sentences. Third, children's speech errors tend to be nonetheless grammatical, suggesting that they are overgeneralizations of a small set of grammatical rules; (4) Some evidence in favor of the nativist position is that first, people with genetic dysphasia show the types of difficulties in language development that would be predicted from the existence of a biological capacity, and second, newborn infants can contrast the phonemes that are heard in all human languages. Both of these lines of evidence point to an innate, biological mechanism.

Compare Behaviorist and Nativist Explanations for Language Development