Critically Discuss the Position That Reinforcement Plays No Significant Part

Critically discuss the position that reinforcement plays no significant part in first language acquisition. This essay will critically evaluate the position that reinforcement plays no significant role in first language acquisition. Reinforcement can be defined as any activity, either a reward-positive, or punishment-negative reinforcement, intended to strengthen or extinguish a response or behaviour, making it’s occurrence more or less probable, intense or frequent (McGraw-hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine, 2002). First language acquisition refers to the process of one learning their first language (Clark, 2000).

The aim of this essay is to critically analyse the role in which reinforcement plays in first language acquisition through existing literature and experiments, and from this gather significant results and findings to accurately answer this question. This will involve extensive research on how children learn a system that requires mastery of the sound system, a huge vocabulary, grammatical rules, meanings, and rules for usage, as well as articulatory skill, auditory discrimination, memory storage, recognition, and retrieval.What may be innate and what learned in this complex task has long intrigued psychologists, linguists and philosophers (Bloom, 1993). Due to the anti-behaviourist trends in recent decades in the area of language acquisition, there has been major doubt on the impact of reinforcement during first language acquisition (Moerk, 1983). Roger Brown, one of the founders of the modern study of language development, identified a framework based on stages to understand and predict the path that normal expression language development usually takes (Bowen, 1998).

Brown provided authoritative assertions on the insignificance of the absence of mother-child interactions without independent evaluations (Moerk, 1983). To reassess these evaluations, the transcripts of Brown were reanalysed and an experiment was designed using samples of two children’s, Adam and Eve, interactions with their mothers. Adam was between 27 and 35 months old and Eve between 18 and 27 months during the time of data collection.Thirty-nine teaching techniques of the mothers and thirty-seven learning strategies of the children were differentiated. The teaching techniques included conditioned positive reinforcement, obvious linguistic corrections, conditioned punishment, several forms of less obvious corrections, and various forms of modelling.

Frequencies of techniques as well as frequencies of specific linguistic constructions in the input were counted. Patterns of interactions were established by means of transitional probabilities between the techniques and strategies.The interactions between the mothers and the children exhibited not only a considerable degree of structure, that is, the patterns occurred with a frequency that by far surpassed chance co-occurrences, but they also appeared largely to be instructionally highly meaningful. Since only a small part of the differentiated phenomena could be readily accounted for by learning theoretical conceptualizations, it is furthermore concluded that these conceptualizations do not seem to be sufficient though they appear to be necessary to account for some aspects of language acquisition (Moerk, 1983).The debate of the process of language acquisition has been largely argued over for the last 50 years.

Stimulated by Chomsky’s (1959) review of Skinner’s (1957) Verbal Behaviour, Chomsky argued that Skinner’s assumptions of the environmental factors could not account for language acquisition. It is easy to see how this issue remains unresolved when we look at simple examples such as pets which are brought up in household’s, obviously all animals lack the ability to learn a language therefore rejecting the idea that environmental factors play a role in language acquisition.While on the other hand children from different parts of the world grow up learning different languages which would obviously suggest the world around them plays a huge role in their acquisition of their first language. The issue of the role of language acquisition remains unanswered. It is possible that normal children are able to acquire, at least the basics, of language through observation (Whitehurst & Valdez-Menchaca, 1988). It is also possible that as language is operant behaviour, children should not acquire language unless parents and others reinforce it (Skinner, 1957).

There is also a third possibility-that the situation with regard to language and reinforcement is complicated, with some forms of language development depending on reinforcement and some not. Such complexity is implicit in the results of Brown and Hanlon's (1970) often-cited study of the role of reinforcement in grammatical development. ‘These investigators indicated that their subjects' parents gave corrective feedback on the dimension of "truth value" rather than grammar. These results are usually nterpreted as demonstrating that reinforcement is not important in grammatical development and are often generalized to language development in general’ (Whitehurst & Valdez-Menchaca, 1988).

I would argue that the third possibility is the most viable and that some forms of language acquisition are a result of reinforcement while some are not. Environmental experiences, especially reinforcement must have a modifying effect, as mistakes in a child’ language, such as saying ‘mouses’ instead of ‘mice’ are corrected over time.It has also been shown that children who are talked to by their parents a lot have a larger vocabulary than those who are not (Clark-Stewart, 1973). There are many arguments that are against Skinner’s theory, such as reinforcement cannot explain the speed of language acquisition or this theory should then work for certain animals.

I would argue that while these arguments may be true, none of them are able to show that reinforcement does not play a role in language acquisition.Some exciting recent research in language acquisition shows that this social influence can be richer and subtler than the simplest assumptions of “training” that many falsely attribute to Skinner. This influence from the social community spans many levels of language learning: From early vocalization, and perhaps even to the syntactic forms used by the child (Dale et al. 2008). A classic example of how social interaction is necessary in language acquisition is Bard and Sachs (1977) ‘Jim the deaf child’. In this example two children of perfect hearing had deaf parents.

One was 3years and 9months old while the other was one year and 8months old. The children were looked after mainly by their mother, however she did not speak or sign to them. The older child’s language was below age level. At this time intervention in the form of a speech therapist started. Intervention led to improvements in expressive ability and by the time Jim had reached 4 years of age the deviant utterance patterns in his speech had disappeared. As he developed, his spontaneous speech and school performance were normal.

They younger child at first had no speech, but acquired language normally after intervention. Sundberg et al. (1996) conducted an experiment using paired conditions to test reinforcement. The vocal behaviour of five children was recorded and analyzed during pre- and post-pairing conditions. Between these conditions there was a pairing condition where a target sound, word, or phrase was paired with an established form of reinforcement (e.

g. , tickling). In the first experiment all of the children emitted the targeted responses during the post-pairing condition.The results showed that the children acquired new vocal and verbal responses by pairing neutral stimuli with established forms of conditioned or unconditioned reinforcement. The results of this experiment showed new vocal responses were acquired by the children without the use of direct reinforcement, echoic training, or prompts. In the second experiment several parameters of the pairing procedure were examined.

The results of the two experiments have implications for the analysis of native language acquisition, and for the development of language intervention procedures for individuals who fail to acquire language (Sundberg et al, 1996).Bijou and Baer (1965) have also conducted experiments from a behavioural perspective which identifies environmental perspectives which play a role in a young child’s babbling. The variables used in this experiment emerged as containing a combination of respondent and operant conditioning (Sundberg et al, 1996). A child’s first vocalizations such as crying and coughing are not identified and direct reinforcer’s and as so, used to reject behaviour as a role in language acquisition. Skinners theory believed that reinforcement consisted of both direct and indirect forms of reinforcement.

Both Chomsky and Brown fail to recognise automatic reinforcement as a role in first language acquisition. I would argue that automatic reinforcement plays a significant role in how infants first acquire their native language from the people around them. These empirical studies demonstrated that a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure can induce vocal sounds, words, or phrases. This stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure was furthered by ongoing research. Participants in both studies were infants and children who had many forms of verbal behaviour and presented normal development.Evaluation of these procedures with children with more severe delays, or with major deficits in vocal play and language acquisition, is warranted.

The relation between pairing effectiveness and the nature of the existing repertoire is not clear. Yoon & Bennett (2000) extended the investigation of the effect of a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure to four preschool children with severe developmental delays who had no oral motor or vocal verbal imitation skills and no functional vocal verbal behaviour in their repertoire. In Experiment 1, novel vocal sounds were paired with preferred timuli (e. g. , tickles) approximately 36 times during a 3 minute pairing session. All participants showed an increase in the target sound immediately after the pairing session.

In Experiment 2, the pairing condition was compared with an echoic condition in which a reinforcer was given only contingent upon imitation of an antecedent vocal sound. This comparison was necessary in order to determine whether the increase in the target sounds in Experiment I could have been advantageously reinforced during the pairing condition.In a comparison of pre-echoic, echoic, post-echoic, pairing and post-pairing conditions, an immediate and significant increase in the target sound occurred only after the pairing condition. These results imply that automatic reinforcement through stimulus-stimulus pairing is a more effective than direct reinforcement by echoic training for children with severe delays who have little to no baseline verbal behaviour.

It should also be noted that for three of the four participants vocal sounds eventually extinguished during the post pairing sessions.This is to be expected if the stimulus properties of the vocal responses were functioning as conditioned reinforcers. In the post-pairing condition, the primary reinforcer was no longer being delivered (Yoon & Feliciano, 2007). While it is clear to see reinforcement cannot be the only factor in the development of a child’s first language it remains impossible to show how it doesn’t play a role. The question this essay tries to deal with is does it play a significant role and the author feels it does.First of all the argument against the role of reinforcement fails to recognise the importance in automatic reinforcement and only deals with the behavioural aspect in terms of direct reinforcement.

The experiment relating to the children with deaf parents also shows clear examples of the impacts made by reinforcement. David Regler’s letter to the New York Times in 1993 detailed an account of a young girl who was hospitalized at the age of 13 due to being ‘virtually unsocialized’.This letter also makes a strong case for that of the significant role of reinforcement not only in language development but in all areas of development. This story takes us through how this girl was raised inhumanely and how this led to her needing serious attention and care.

Once the girl receives proper treatment and care from specialists we see how her development progresses. Unfortunately we see how once the proper care ceases; so does her development. Recent and ongoing experiments continue to identify how reinforcement, particularly automatic reinforcement, plays a significant role in first language acquisition.The author believes that the question of the role of reinforcement in first language acquisition will never be answered fully unless experiments with ecological validity can show reinforcement does not play a role in language acquisition. As this essay leans in favour of reinforcement as a factor, the author suggests that it is impossible to show the extent to which reinforcement plays a role in first language acquisition but strongly agrees with the statement ‘reinforcement plays a significant role in first language acquisition’.

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