BEHAVIORIST THEORY ON LANGUAGE LEARNING AND ACQUISITION

Introduction

There are some basic theories advanced to describe how language is acquired, learnt andtaught. The behaviorist theory, Mentalist theory (Innatism), Rationalist theory (otherwise calledCognitive theory), and Interactionism are some of these theories.Of these, behaviorist theory and mentalist theory are mainly applicable to the acquisition ofnative languages while the rest can account for foreign language acquisition. Yet, these fourfundamental theories of language acquisition cannot be totally divorced from each other, for "theobjectives of second language learning are not necessarily entirely determined by nativelanguage competence inevitably serves as a foil against which to set second languagelearning." (H.H. Stem, .1983; 30).

Mother Tongue and Foreign Language Learning

These five basic theories are, furthermore, very much complementary to each other, servingdifferent types of learners or representing various cases of language learning. They must notautomatically make us presume that first and second language learning are identical or alikeprocesses, though second language learning is strongly tied up with first language acquisition.Obviously, native language growth must pave the way for foreign language growth. Then thesefive basic language learning theories are fundamental pillars of language learning whoserelevance to education is undeniable.

The Principle of the Behaviorist Theory

The behaviorist theory believes that “infants learn oral language from other human role modelsthrough a process involving imitation, rewards, and practice. Human role models in an infant’senvironment provide the stimuli and rewards,” (Cooter & Reutzel, 2004). When a child attemptsoral language or imitates the sounds or speech patterns they are usually praised and givenaffection for their efforts. Thus, praise and affection becomes the rewards. However, thebehaviorist theory is scrutinized for a variety of reasons. If rewards play such a vital componentin language development, what about the parent who is inattentive or not present when the childattempts speech? If a baby’s language learning is motivated strictly by rewards would thespeech attempts stop merely for lack of rewards (Cooter & Reutzel, 2004)? Other casesagainst this theory include “learning the use and meaning of abstract words, evidence of novelforms of language not modeled by others, and uniformity of language acquisition in humans”(Cooter & Reutzel, 2004).

The Background of the Behaviorist Theory

 The behaviorist theory believes that “infants learn oral language from other human role modelsthrough a process involving imitation, rewards, and practice. Human role models in an infant’senvironment provide the stimuli and rewards,” (Cooter & Reutzel, 2004). When a child attemptsoral language or imitates the sounds or speech patterns they are usually praised and givenaffection for their efforts. Thus, praise and affection becomes the rewards. However, thebehaviorist theory is scrutinized for a variety of reasons. If rewards play such a vital componentin language development, what about the parent who is inattentive or not present when the childattempts speech? If a baby’s language learning is motivated strictly by rewards would thespeech attempts stop merely for lack of rewards (Cooter & Reutzel, 2004)? Other casesagainst this theory include “learning the use and meaning of abstract words, evidence of novel

 

Basic Tenents of Behaviorist Theory

 The following principles illustrate the operating principles of behaviorism:

 

Counterarguments on Behaviorist Theory of Language Learning

Needless to say, language teaching anticipates certain theories on language learning becauselanguage learning as a fruitful area that embodies the working of human behavior and mentalprocesses of the learners. Each theory may not be complete model for the investigation oflanguage learning. The following counter-arguments can be made upon the working principlesof behaviorist theory:1) Basic strategies of language learning within the scope of behaviorist theory are imitation,reinforcement, and rewarding. However, researches made on the acquisition of learning havedemonstrated that children’s imitation of structures show evidence of almost no innovation;moreover children "vary considerably in the amount that they imitate" (L.M. Bloom, L. Hood, andP.L. Lightbown, 1974; 380-420). Since children do not imitate such structures like words,phrases, clauses and sentences at the same rate they will naturally learn at different rates eventhough it must be admitted that imitation is very useful in the acquisition of new vocabularyitems. As for reinforcement, "Unfortunately this view of learning receives little support from theavailable evidence" (Herbert H. Clark and Eve V. Clark, 1977; 336), for the parents only correctthe sample structures, and complex structures are occasionally corrected.2) In behaviorist theory, the process of learning relies more on generalization, rewarding,conditioning, three of which support the development of analogical learning in children. But itcan be argued that a process of learning or teaching that encourages the learner to constructphrases, clauses and sentences modeled on previously settled set of rules and drills is thoughtto obstruct the instinctive production of language. Then, habit formation exercises may notnaturally promote intrinsically oriented language learning.3) Obstructions made on instinctively-based learning will doubtedlessly harm the creative way oflearning. It takes a long time to be capable enough to master a language at least a bitintrinsically. There is a threshold level in language learning. This means that learners must learnconsciously supported by repetition and drilling to build up an effective linguistic intuition,acquisition of which marks the establishment of threshold level. Before obtaining the thresholdlevel, the language learner is not creative, cannot use the language properly in new situations ina real sense. it is, then, obvious that the intrinsic learning will be delayed, owing to the Iateacquisition of threshold level because of previously settled set of rules and drills.4) The rate of social influence on learning is not satisfactorily explained. To what extent andrate, does the social surrounding promote language learning? This question remainsunexplained.5) It is highly unlikely for learning to be the same for each individual; that is, each person cannotlearn equally well in the same conditions in which learning takes place, for the background andthe experience of the learners make everybody learn differently. In addition, according toChomsky, there must be some innate capacities which human beings possess that predisposethem to look for basic patters in language.6) The main strategies of the behaviorist theory can only be true for the early stages of learningwhich takes place when the kids are in infancy and in early childhood periods. Moreover, thistheory is fruitful for the most part on animal experimentation and learning.

 

7) Many of the learning processes are mostly too complex, and for this reason there areintervening variable s, which cannot be observed between stimulus and response. "That's why,language acquisition cannot take place through habit formation, since language learners arethrown between stimulus and response chain, for language is too far complicated to be learnedin such a matter, especially given the brief time available.

CONCLUSION

It is clear that language learning and its development, for the behaviorists, is a matter ofconditioning by means of imitation, practice, reinforcement, and habituation, which constitutethe paces of language acquisition. It must be born in mind that all behavioristic theories oflearning are associationistic, including Thorndike's, Guthrie's, Hull's, Skinner's, and the theory ofthe school of functionalism. Apparently, behaviorism has its shortcomings, but it cannot bedenied that learning process is for the most part a behavioristic processing, a verbal behavior.In language teaching area, behaviorism establishes the basic background of exercises, eitheroral or written in viewing language as stimulus and response. In addition, it gives a great deal ofinsight into the recognition of the use of controlled observation to discover the laws of behavior.It has exerted a great impact by influencing many teaching methods on the area of languageteaching, for example, Audiolingual Method, Total Physical Response, and Silent Way embodythe behaviorist view of language; also, British Structuralism has created the theory of languagecalled Situational Language Teaching. In a word behaviorist theory aims at discoveringbehavioral justifications for designing language teaching in certain ways, being a hub a of manylanguage teaching and learning theories. It must not be forgotten that it has given a push for thecreation of empiricist language learning which became very fashionable in U .S.A. and inEurope.

 

Basic Tenents of Behaviorist Theory

 The following principles illustrate the operating principles of behaviorism:

 

Counterarguments on Behaviorist Theory of Language Learning

Needless to say, language teaching anticipates certain theories on language learning becauselanguage learning as a fruitful area that embodies the working of human behavior and mentalprocesses of the learners. Each theory may not be complete model for the investigation oflanguage learning. The following counter-arguments can be made upon the working principlesof behaviorist theory:1) Basic strategies of language learning within the scope of behaviorist theory are imitation,reinforcement, and rewarding. However, researches made on the acquisition of learning havedemonstrated that children’s imitation of structures show evidence of almost no innovation;moreover children "vary considerably in the amount that they imitate" (L.M. Bloom, L. Hood, andP.L. Lightbown, 1974; 380-420). Since children do not imitate such structures like words,phrases, clauses and sentences at the same rate they will naturally learn at different rates eventhough it must be admitted that imitation is very useful in the acquisition of new vocabularyitems. As for reinforcement, "Unfortunately this view of learning receives little support from theavailable evidence" (Herbert H. Clark and Eve V. Clark, 1977; 336), for the parents only correctthe sample structures, and complex structures are occasionally corrected.2) In behaviorist theory, the process of learning relies more on generalization, rewarding,conditioning, three of which support the development of analogical learning in children. But itcan be argued that a process of learning or teaching that encourages the learner to constructphrases, clauses and sentences modeled on previously settled set of rules and drills is thoughtto obstruct the instinctive production of language. Then, habit formation exercises may notnaturally promote intrinsically oriented language learning.3) Obstructions made on instinctively-based learning will doubtedlessly harm the creative way oflearning. It takes a long time to be capable enough to master a language at least a bitintrinsically. There is a threshold level in language learning. This means that learners must learnconsciously supported by repetition and drilling to build up an effective linguistic intuition,acquisition of which marks the establishment of threshold level. Before obtaining the thresholdlevel, the language learner is not creative, cannot use the language properly in new situations ina real sense. it is, then, obvious that the intrinsic learning will be delayed, owing to the Iateacquisition of threshold level because of previously settled set of rules and drills.4) The rate of social influence on learning is not satisfactorily explained. To what extent andrate, does the social surrounding promote language learning? This question remainsunexplained.5) It is highly unlikely for learning to be the same for each individual; that is, each person cannotlearn equally well in the same conditions in which learning takes place, for the background andthe experience of the learners make everybody learn differently. In addition, according toChomsky, there must be some innate capacities which human beings possess that predisposethem to look for basic patters in language.6) The main strategies of the behaviorist theory can only be true for the early stages of learningwhich takes place when the kids are in infancy and in early childhood periods. Moreover, thistheory is fruitful for the most part on animal experimentation and learning.

 

7) Many of the learning processes are mostly too complex, and for this reason there areintervening variable s, which cannot be observed between stimulus and response. "That's why,language acquisition cannot take place through habit formation, since language learners arethrown between stimulus and response chain, for language is too far complicated to be learnedin such a matter, especially given the brief time available.

CONCLUSION

It is clear that language learning and its development, for the behaviorists, is a matter ofconditioning by means of imitation, practice, reinforcement, and habituation, which constitutethe paces of language acquisition. It must be born in mind that all behavioristic theories oflearning are associationistic, including Thorndike's, Guthrie's, Hull's, Skinner's, and the theory ofthe school of functionalism. Apparently, behaviorism has its shortcomings, but it cannot bedenied that learning process is for the most part a behavioristic processing, a verbal behavior.In language teaching area, behaviorism establishes the basic background of exercises, eitheroral or written in viewing language as stimulus and response. In addition, it gives a great deal ofinsight into the recognition of the use of controlled observation to discover the laws of behavior.It has exerted a great impact by influencing many teaching methods on the area of languageteaching, for example, Audiolingual Method, Total Physical Response, and Silent Way embodythe behaviorist view of language; also, British Structuralism has created the theory of languagecalled Situational Language Teaching. In a word behaviorist theory aims at discoveringbehavioral justifications for designing language teaching in certain ways, being a hub a of manylanguage teaching and learning theories. It must not be forgotten that it has given a push for thecreation of empiricist language learning which became very fashionable in U .S.A. and inEurope.

Structure of language

Phonetics- speech sounds-vowels,consonents,diphthongs

Phonemes

In linguistics, a phoneme is the smallest sound unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinct meaning, such as the s of sing and the r of ring. Adjective: phonemic.

Phonemes are language specific. In other words, phonemes that are functionally distinct in English (for example, /b/ and /p/) may not be so in another language. (Phonemes are customarily written between slashes, thus /b/ and /p/.) Different languages have different phonemes.

Etymology
From the Greek, "sound"

Morphemes

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. In other words, it is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. When it stands by itself, it is considered as a root because it has a meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an affix because it has a grammatical function (e.g. the –s in cats to indicate that it is plural).Every word comprises one or more morphemes.

Classification of morphemes

Free and bound morphemes

Every morpheme can be classified as either free or bound.These categories are mutually exclusive, and as such, a given morpheme will belong to exactly one of them.

·         Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear within lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).

·         Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un- appears only accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in English are affixes, particularly prefixes and suffixes. Examples of suffixes are -tion, -ation, -ible, -ing, etc. Bound morphemes that are not affixes are called cranberry morphemes.

Classification of bound morphemes

Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional.

Derivational morphemes

·         Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change either the semantic meaning or part of speech of the affected word. For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational morpheme, for it inverts the meaning of the word formed by the root kind. Generally the affixes used with a root word are bound morphemes.

Inflectional morphemes

·         Inflectional morphemes modify a verb's tense, aspect, mood, person, or number, or a noun's, pronoun's or adjective's number, gender or case, without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech). Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited. An inflectional morpheme changes the form of a word. In English, there are eight inflections.

Allomorphs

Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ in pronunciation but are semantically identical. For example, in English, the plural marker -(e)s of regular nouns can be pronounced /-z/, /-s/, or /-ɪz, -əz/, depending on the final sound of the noun's singular form. For example, plural ending s (as in bats), z (as in bugs), iz (as in buses).

Zero morphemes/null morphemes

Generally these types of morphemes have no visible changes. For instance the singular form of sheep is "sheep" and its plural is also "sheep". The intended meaning is thus derived from the co-occurring determiner (e.g. in this case "some-" or "a-").

Content vs. function

Content morphemes express a concrete meaning or content, while function morphemes have more of a grammatical role. For example, the morphemes fast and sad can be considered content morphemes. On the other hand, the suffix –ed belongs to the function morphemes given that it has the grammatical function of indicating past tense. Although these categories seem very clear and intuitive, the idea behind it can be harder to grasp given that they overlap with each other.Examples of an ambiguous situation are the preposition over and the determiner your, which seem to have a concrete meaning, but are considered function morphemes because their role is to connect ideas grammatically.A general rule to follow to determine the category of a morpheme is:

·         Content morphemes include free morphemes that are nouns, adverbs, adjectives, and verbs. It also includes bound morphemes that are bound roots and derivational affixes.

·         Function morphemes can be free morphemes that are prepositions, pronouns, determiners, and conjunctions. Additionally, they can be bound morphemes that are inflectional affixes.

Other features of morphemes

Roots are composed of only one morpheme, while stems can be composed of more than one morpheme. Any additional affixes are considered morphemes. An example of this is the word quirkiness. The root is quirk, but the stem is quirky which has two morphemes. Moreover, there exist pairs of affixes that have the same phonological form, but have different meaning. For example, the suffix –er can be derivative (e.g. sell ⇒ seller) or inflectional (e.g. small ⇒ smaller). These types of morphemes are called homophonous.

Some words might seem to be composed of multiple morphemes, but in fact they are not. This is why one has to consider form and meaning when identifying morphemes. For example, the word relate might seem to be composed of two morphemes, re- (prefix) and the word late, but this is not correct. These morphemes have no relationship with the definitions relevant to the word like “feel sympathy”, “narrate”, or “being connected by blood or marriage”. Furthermore, the length of the words does not determine if it has multiple morphemes or not. To demonstrate, the word Madagascar is long and it might seem to have morphemes like mad, gas, and car, but it does not. Conversely, small words can have multiple morphemes (e.g. dogs).

Morphological analysis

In natural language processing for Korean, Japanese, Chinese and other languages, morphological analysis is the process of segmenting a sentence into a row of morphemes. Morphological analysis is closely related to part-of-speech tagging, but word segmentation is required for these languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces.

The purpose of morphological analysis is to determine the minimal units of meaning in a language or morphemes by using comparisons of similar forms—for example, comparing forms such as “She is walking” and “They are walking” rather than comparing either of these with something completely different like “You are reading”. Thus, we can effectively break down the forms in parts and distinguish the different morphemes. Similarly, the meaning and the form are equally important during the identification of morphemes. For instance, agent and comparative morphemes illustrate this point. An agent morpheme is an affix like -er that transforms a verb into a noun (e.g. teach ⇒ teacher). On the other hand, –er can also be a comparative morpheme that changes an adjective into another degree of the same adjective (e.g. small ⇒ smaller). In this case, the form is the same, but the meaning of both morphemes is different. Also, the opposite can occur in which the meaning is the same but the form is different.

Changing definitions of morpheme

In generative grammar, the definition of a morpheme depends heavily on whether syntactic trees have morphemes as leaves or features as leaves.

·         Direct surface to syntax mapping LFG – leaves are words

·         Direct syntax to semantics mapping

·         Leaves in syntactic trees spell out morphemes: Distributed morphology – leaves are morphemes

·         Branches in syntactic trees spell out morphemes: Radical Minimalism and Nanosyntax – leaves are "nano" morpho-syntactic features

Given the definition of morpheme as "the smallest meaningful unit" Nanosyntax aims to account for idioms where it is often an entire syntactic tree which contributes "the smallest meaningful unit." An example idiom is "Don't let the cat out of the bag" where the idiom is composed of "let the cat out of the bag" and that might be considered a semantic morpheme, which is composed of many syntactic morphemes. Other cases where the "smallest meaningful unit" is larger than a word include some collocations such as "in view of" and "business intelligence" where the words together have a specific meaning.

The definition of morphemes also plays a significant role in the interfaces of generative grammar in the following theoretical constructs;

·         Event semantics: the idea that each productive morpheme must have a compositional semantic meaning (a denotation), and if the meaning is there, there must be a morpheme (null or overt).

·         Spell-out: the interface where syntactic/semantic structures are "spelled-out" using words or morphemes with phonological content. This can also be thought of as lexical insertion into the syntactics.

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax (/ˈsɪntæks/ is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, specifically word order and punctuation. The term syntax is also used to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages.

The word syntax comes from Ancient Greek: σύνταξις "coordination", which consists of σύν syn, "together," and τάξις táxis, "an ordering".