A movement in psychology important in the first half of the twentieth century. It was based upon a view, prevalent from the 1920s to the 1950s, that we can only speculate about the operations of the human mind and that psychologists should therefore restrict themselves to studying external manifestations of human behaviour (behavior). Some of the proponents of behaviourism denied the existence of consciousness. It was suggested that thought was dependent upon language, and was a sub-vocal form of speech.
Behaviourism is principally a theory of learning based upon the relationship between an external stimulus and the individual’s response to it through acquired behavior. One type of learning is classical conditioning, where an established response becomes attached to a new stimulus. Example: Pavlov trained dogs to associate food with the ringing of a bell and they finally began to salivate when they heard the bell alone. Another is operant conditioning, where a response becomes established because it is rewarded or reinforced.
Asserting that language is simply ‘verbal behaviour’ (or behavior), Skinner (1957) put forward an account of first language acquisition based upon operant conditioning. His view was that a child acquires language through imitating adult utterances. Parents provide models of language. They also provide reinforcement through showing approval, through carrying out the child’s wishes or through recognizing, responding to and echoing the child’s utterances. Utterances which approximate to adult language are rewarded; others are not.
Grammar is said to develop in the form of sentence frames into which words or phrases can be inserted. A process of ‘chaining’ accounts for the way in which words are organized in sequence, with the first word in the sentence providing a stimulus for the second, the second for the third and so on. This account considerably stretches what was originally understood by the terms ‘stimulus’ and ‘reinforcement’. Skinner attempted to categorise child language in terms of the behavioral functions involved. He identified echoic utterances (¼ imitation); mands, where the child expresses a wish for something; tacts, where the child responds to non-verbal cues by, for example, naming something; and socially driven intraverbal responses which bear no syntactic relationship to the verbal stimulus that gave rise to them.
Skinner’s account of language acquisition received a scathing review from the young Noam Chomsky, who asserted that adult speech is ‘impoverished’ and therefore does not provide a good or adequate model for imitation. Nor can imitation explain why infants produce incorrect utterances such as I goed. Chomsky pointed out that parents reinforce and correct very few of their children’s utterances. Most importantly, he drew attention to the generative nature of language: suggesting that a theory of language acquisition must account for the way in which the infant acquires the capacity to produce an infinite number of grammatical utterances, most of which it cannot have heard before. Until Chomsky’s riposte, behaviourism exercised considerable influence on thinking in both pure and applied linguistics. Especially prevalent was the behaviourist view that language is a set of acquired habits. This shaped early theories of foreign language learning, which saw the process as involving the replacement of first-language habits with habits appropriate to the target language.
Further reading: Chomsky (1959); Greene (1975: 26–53); Owens (2001); Skinner (1957)
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