Imagine that you could go back in time and arrange for B. F. Skinner (a prominent behaviorist) and Noam Chomsky (a prominent nativist) to discuss and debate the mechanisms that underlie children's language development. Formulate answers that these two theorists might give to each of the following questions:

Question

a. Is language development the result of nature, nurture, or a combination of the two?
b. What specific mechanisms promote language development?
c. How might you refute your opponent's position on language development?
What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Responses to various parts of the question are as follows:
a. Skinner would take a strict "nurture" position, saying that language development is entirely the result of environmental events. Chomsky would say that nature provides a language acquisition device that facilitates language learning in human beings but that exposure to a particular language (nurture) is also crucial.
b. In Skinner's view, parents and other people reinforce language-like utterances and become increasingly fussy about what they reinforce, until eventually children produce mature speech. (If your students have background in behaviorist theories of learning, they may use the term shaping in their discussion.) In Chomsky's view, a biologically built-in language acquisition device sensitizes infants to subtle distinctions in spoken language, helps them divide a steady stream of auditory input into small segments (e.g., syllables), identify patterns in what they hear, and impose certain limits (e.g., a Universal Grammar) on the syntactic rules they formulate for their language. The powerfulness (or perhaps the very existence) of this language acquisition device appears to fade over time, as reflected in the fact that children show early sensitive periods in language learning.
c. Chomsky would critique Skinner's position by pointing out that (a) parents tend to reinforce statements that are factually accurate regardless of whether the statements are grammatically correct and (b) children often persist in using some grammatical forms despite others' discouragement. Skinner might argue that the apparent "sensitive periods" in language development are due to the fact that language behaviors acquired early in life may interfere with learning very different language behaviors later on. (You should give credit for any credible behaviorist refutation of nativism, as a behaviorist critique of nativist views is not presented in the textbook.)