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How Much of Language Acquisition Does Operant Conditioning Explain?
Since the 1950s, when Chomsky argued that Skinner’s arguments could not explain syntactic acquisition, psychologists have generally avoided explicitly invoking operant or instrumental conditioning as a learning mechanism for language among human children. In this article, we argue that this is a mis...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2017
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5671510/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29163295 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01918 |
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author | Sturdy, Christopher B. Nicoladis, Elena |
author_facet | Sturdy, Christopher B. Nicoladis, Elena |
author_sort | Sturdy, Christopher B. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Since the 1950s, when Chomsky argued that Skinner’s arguments could not explain syntactic acquisition, psychologists have generally avoided explicitly invoking operant or instrumental conditioning as a learning mechanism for language among human children. In this article, we argue that this is a mistake. We focus on research that has been done on language learning in human infants and toddlers in order to illustrate our points. Researchers have ended up inventing learning mechanisms that, in actual practice, not only resemble but also in fact are examples of operant conditioning (OC) by any other name they select. We argue that language acquisition researchers should proceed by first ruling out OC before invoking alternative learning mechanisms. While it is possible that OC cannot explain all of the language acquisition, simple learning mechanisms that work across species may have some explanatory power in children’s language learning. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5671510 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-56715102017-11-21 How Much of Language Acquisition Does Operant Conditioning Explain? Sturdy, Christopher B. Nicoladis, Elena Front Psychol Psychology Since the 1950s, when Chomsky argued that Skinner’s arguments could not explain syntactic acquisition, psychologists have generally avoided explicitly invoking operant or instrumental conditioning as a learning mechanism for language among human children. In this article, we argue that this is a mistake. We focus on research that has been done on language learning in human infants and toddlers in order to illustrate our points. Researchers have ended up inventing learning mechanisms that, in actual practice, not only resemble but also in fact are examples of operant conditioning (OC) by any other name they select. We argue that language acquisition researchers should proceed by first ruling out OC before invoking alternative learning mechanisms. While it is possible that OC cannot explain all of the language acquisition, simple learning mechanisms that work across species may have some explanatory power in children’s language learning. Frontiers Media S.A. 2017-10-31 /pmc/articles/PMC5671510/ /pubmed/29163295 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01918 Text en Copyright © 2017 Sturdy and Nicoladis. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Sturdy, Christopher B. Nicoladis, Elena How Much of Language Acquisition Does Operant Conditioning Explain? |
title | How Much of Language Acquisition Does Operant Conditioning Explain? |
title_full | How Much of Language Acquisition Does Operant Conditioning Explain? |
title_fullStr | How Much of Language Acquisition Does Operant Conditioning Explain? |
title_full_unstemmed | How Much of Language Acquisition Does Operant Conditioning Explain? |
title_short | How Much of Language Acquisition Does Operant Conditioning Explain? |
title_sort | how much of language acquisition does operant conditioning explain? |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5671510/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29163295 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01918 |
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