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In terms of child language acquisition ...

Chomskyan linguists argue that:

- Children learn language too easily. It should take them longer for the whole behaviourist learning process

- Children have innate knowledge of language

- Children produce incorrect utterances that they haven't heard anywhere before and so can't have imitated.

In terms of second language acquisition ...

- Learners make mistakes that are not grammatical in their first language either. Again, they can't have imitated this.

- Learners learn some things easily but some things, no amount of imitation and reinforcement will help them learn

Among other things...

No-one really believes in behaviourist learning theory anymore.

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Q: Why is it difficult to explain language acquisition solely in terms of imitation and reinforcement?
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Who proposed that children's language development was caused by imitation and reinforcement?

B.F. Skinner proposed that children's language development was caused by imitation and reinforcement.


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Duncan Markham has written: 'Phonetic imitation, accent, and the learner' -- subject(s): Second language acquisition, Speech perception


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Why is psycholinguistics considered mentalists rather than behavioristic?

To answer briefly and non-technically, Behaviorism discounts the validity of seeking answers to the question of language acquistion through a "psychological" approach. That is, language is a learned behavior conditioned through stimulus-response-reinforcement processes. Imitation plays a large role in the Behaviorists explanation of how humans learn a language. Psycholinguistics, greatly informed by Noam Chomsky, argues the opposite. That is, language acquisition is an innate ability. Psycholinguistics, among other things, also investigates the cognitive and neurological processing of language in the human brain. To make a simplified analogy: language, according to Behaviorists, comes from the outside in. "Mentalists" argue that language goes from the inside out.


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