Nature VS Nurture in CLA

SKINNER AND BEHAVOURISM: 

Skinner (1904-90) was an American psychologist his book 'Verbal Behaviour' was very influential. Through experiments of rats and pigeons he came to the proposed theory that all behaviour is a result of the conditioning we have experienced rather than any freedom of choice. He proposed the theory of operant conditioning.This was linked to positive and negative reinforcement --> look at psych. If a child is using a grammatically correct sentence in speech then a mother may praise this = positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement however, describes the opposite situation whereby a less favourable response will not be praised, with the child being less likely to use such an utterance again.  

Criticism: Children are more likely to be corrected on the truth of their utterances rather than the linguistic accuracy of it, so negative reinforcement in the linguistic sense does not occur very often. --> 'We runned away from nursery' the truth behind this may be questioned more that the poor grammar of 'runned' not 'ran'. 

Evaluation: There is evidence to suggest that the children do not…