The Behaviourist Theory

First Language Acquisition

The behaviourists consider first language acquisition as a matter of imitation and habit formation. Children imitate what they hear and they are encouraged to do so. They continue to imitate and practice the words and sentences until they form habits of correct usage (Lightbown and Spada 1993:1). Unlike a parrot, children select to imitate patterns that they are currently learning. In other words, children choose what to imitate on the basis of the availab le input to which they are exposed (Lightbown and Spada 1993: 3). The behaviourists account of first language acquisition presents a helpful approach to understand how children acquire certain regular and routine aspects of language. However, acquiring the complicated system of language requires a different type of explanation (Lightbown and Spada 1993: 7) and we will see later some of the theoretical views that are different from the behaviourist approach to language.

Second Language Acquisition

Behaviourists believe that learning is a process of habit formation. Habits are formed by receiving the linguistic data from the surrounding environment and by the reinforcement received for the good attempts made to repeat or imitate certain patterns. Because behaviourists consider language maturation as a matter of forming habits, they assume that a learner acquiring a second language begins with habits related to the first language. These habits influence those required for second language acquisition, and the learner has to form new habits (Lado1964 in Lightbown and Spada 1993: 23).

The behaviourists treat errors in second language acquisition as interference from first language habits. This psychological learning theory is often related to what is called the contrastive analysis hypothesis. The proponents of this hypothesis claim that if similarities between two languages exist, the language learner will acquire the second language more easily, but if differences are encountered the acquisition of the targ et language will be more difficult (Klein

1986: 25). Whereas it may be true that the first language has an influence on learning the second, it is also suggested that the learner uses the knowledge already acquired in learning another language (Lightbown a nd Spada 1993: 23). Lightbown and Spada (1993: 23) point out that the behaviourist explanation of second language acquisition is incomplete. It seems that the behaviourist theory is inadequate because it has three major flaws related to the imitation and reinforcement perspectives. These problems are summarised below.
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Children create words which do not exist in the adult language like nana for banana.

Children make errors that are not heard in the adult speech. Children make errors like saying goed in stead of went or cutted instead of cut. These errors are important because they show us that children are not only imitating but they are also generalising rules of the language. Children here seem to be constructing a grammar not just imitating.

What parents and other adults seem to do is to reinforce children for being truthful. For example if a child produces a grammatically correct sentence such as the cat wants to eat, parents tend to correct the child if the sentence is untrue, as in no John, the cat does not want to eat. It just ate. However, if the childs sentence is true but it is ungrammatical, such as Faraj goed to school yesterday, parents often answer yes, he did without correcting the wrong goed. Even if parents and adults correct the grammaticality of the childrens utterances, children tend to be determined to continue generating the same grammatical mistakes. There is no doubt that imitation, memorisation and practice do explain the acquisition of certain aspects of language such as word meanings and some language habits. However, imitation and habit formation alone cannot account for the intricate knowledge that children acquire.

Because of the facts mentioned above, psycholinguistics and other language acquisition researchers have turned to what they claim to be more adequate theories of language acquisition.

The Chomskyan Theory

According to behaviourism, learning consists of associating a stimulus with a response. In the late 1950s and 60s, behaviourist learning theory was confronted with some serious and ultimately fatal challenges. First the linguist John Gracia and others performed a number of experiments whose results nevertheless contradicted fundamental behaviourist assumptions. Second, the linguist Noam Chomsky called attention to the fact that virtually every sentence that a person pronounces or comprehends is a novel combination of words uttered for the first time in history. Therefore, a language is not just a store of responses, but the brain must have a progra mme that can generate an infinite number of sentences out of a limited list of words. That programme may be called a mental grammar. The second fundamental fact is that children can develop these grammars by processing the linguistic input and that they ca n understand and construct sentences that they have never heard before. Therefore, he argued, children must be endowed with a set of principles and parameters that are common to all human languages, a universal grammar, that tells them how to infer the syntactic structures out of the language of adults (Pinker 1994: 22).

The proper way to think of universal grammar (UG) is as an innate mental organ specific to the species. Just as our eyes and ears allow us to receive and decode electromagnetic radiation and vibration within certain bandwidths, so does the human language faculty (UG) enable us to receive and understand information governed by certain formal constraints and principles.

Building on the earlier work of his teacher Zelling Harris (Stern 1996 ), Chomsky and his colleagues and students studied language and its structure and discovered that language is both creative and rule -governed. After proposing a theory of its structure, they tried to develop a theory of language acquisition. They proposed that children have a natural endowment that enables them to

acquire language in a limited time with no instruction at all. This assumption is called the innateness hypothesis which says that children are genetically endowed with a device in the brain res ponsible for language production, acquisition and maybe comprehension too. This device is called the language faculty. Current linguists call it universal grammar or UG for short. UG consists of all the principles that cannot be acquired through experi ence. UG theorists argue that all humans have a built -in programme which consists of a set of principles and parameters that tell children what sort of sounds and grammar, are or are not possible in human language. Thus UG facilitates the childrens task of language learning by restricting the possibilities available to them. Principles show children what is possible in a language and what is not. Parameters are possible options from which one can choose in learning one language or another. For example lang uages vary on what can be relativised in relative clauses (Flynn et al 1998): a) subject, b) object, c) indirect object, d) object of preposition, e) genitive, f) object of comparison.

All human languages begin with the first option and use subject relat ive clauses, but other languages have different possible options of relative clauses. However, if one type of relative clause is possible in a given language, then all the other ones to the left must be possible too. There is no language in which object of preposition relative clauses are found but not object relative clauses. Accordingly, children only have to set their parameters on the farthest type of relative clause to the right that is possible in their language. They do no have to learn each kind separately. Therefore, a UG-analysis of second language acquisition could help teachers. It has been suggested that researchers could tell teachers when the parameters are set similarly or differently for both the first and second languages. If the settings, for example for relative clauses, were the same, then the teacher would not need to concentrate on this aspect of language (Bratels, 1999).

So, the children acquiring their mother language have some universal principles that they do not have to learn; they are already there in their brains. Other

specific language rules have to be worked out by processing the speech of adults they hear. By forming hypotheses about the speech of adults and then testing them, children set the parameters which represent the specific properties upon which languages vary. But when we compare how the Chomskyan theory deals with first and second language acquisition, we come up with three distinct views. First language acquisition has only one form within the Chomskyan theory (Cook and Newson, 1998). We have the speech of adults, UG, and finally a competence in a given language. From figure (1) below we see that childr en have a direct access to UG. Children hear the speech of adults, process it in the UG device, and then have their first language competence.