Білім беру бағдарламасына арналған торм 5206 тілдерді оқытудағы психологиялық МӘселелер пәні бойынша лекция тезистерінің жинағы

Language is a fundamental part of total human behavior, and behaviorists examined it as such and sought to formulate consistent theories of first language acquisition. The behavioristic approach focused on the immedi­ately perceptible aspects of linguistic behavior—the publicly observable responses—and the relationships or associations between those responses and events in the world surrounding them. A behaviorist might consider effective language behavior to be the production of correct responses to stimuli. If a particular response is reinforced, it then becomes habitual, or conditioned. Thus children produce linguistic responses that are rein­forced. This is true of their comprehension as well as production responses, although to consider comprehension is to wander just a bit out of the publicly observable realm. One learns to comprehend an utterance by responding appropriately to it and by being reinforced for that response.

One of the best-known attempts to construct a behavioristic model of linguistic behavior was embodied in B.F. Skinner's classic, Verbal Behavior (1957). Skinner was commonly known for his experiments with animal behavior, but he also gained recognition for his contributions to education through teaching machines and programmed learning (Skinner 1968). Skinner's theory of verbal behavior was an extension of his general theory of learning by operant conditioning. Operant conditioning refers to con­ditioning in which the organism (in this case, a human being) emits a response, or operant (a sentence or utterance), without necessarily observable stimuli; that operant is maintained (learned) by reinforcement (for example, a positive verbal or nonverbal response from another person). If a child says "want milk" and a parent gives the child some milk, the operant is reinforced and, over repeated instances, is conditioned. According to Skinner, verbal behavior, like other behavior, is controlled by its consequences. When consequences are rewarding, behavior is main­tained and is increased in strength and perhaps frequency. When conse­quences are punishing, or when there is a total lack of reinforcement, the behavior is weakened and eventually extinguished.

Skinner's theories attracted a number of critics, not the least among them Noam Chomsky (1959), who penned a highly critical review of Verbal Behavior. Some years later, however, Kenneth MacCorquodale (1970) published a reply to Chomsky's review in which he eloquently defended Skinner's points of view. And so the battle raged on. Today vir­tually no one would agree that Skinner's model of verbal behavior ade­quately accounts for the capacity to acquire language, for language development itself, for the abstract nature of language, or for a theory of meaning. A theory based on conditioning and reinforcement is hard-pressed to explain the fact that every sentence you speak or write—with a few trivial exceptions—is novel, never before uttered either by you or by anyone else! These novel utterances are nevertheless created by the speaker and processed by the hearer.

In an attempt to broaden the base of behavioristic theory, some psy­chologists proposed modified theoretical positions. One of these positions was mediation theory, in which meaning was accounted for by the claim that the linguistic stimulus (a word or sentence) elicits a "mediating" response that is self-stimulating. Charles Osgood (1953, 1957) called this self-stimulation a "representational mediation process," a process that is really covert and invisible, acting within the learner. It is interesting that mediation theory thus attempted to account for abstraction by a notion that reeked of "mentalism"—a cardinal sin for dyed-in-the-wool behaviorists! In fact, in some ways mediation theory was really a rational/cognitive theory masquerading as behavioristic.

Mediation theories still left many questions about language unan­swered. The abstract nature of language and the relationship between meaning and utterance were unresolved. All sentences have deep struc­tures—the level of underlying meaning that is only manifested overtly by surface structures. These deep structures are intricately interwoven in a person's total cognitive and affective experience. Such depths of language were scarcely plumbed by mediational theory.

Yet another attempt to account for first language acquisition within a behavioristic framework was made by Jenkins and Palermo (1964). While admitting that their conjectures were "speculative" and "prema­ture," the authors attempted to synthesize notions of generative linguistics and mediational approaches to child language.They claimed that the child may acquire frames of a linear pattern of sentence elements and learn the stimulus-response equivalences that can be substituted within each frame; imitation was an important, if not essential, aspect of establishing stimulus-response associations. But this theory, too, failed to account for the abstract nature of language, for the child's creativity, and for the inter­active nature of language acquisition.

It would appear that the rigor of behavioristic psychology, with its emphasis on empirical observation and the scientific method, only began to explain the miracle of language acquisition. It left untouched genetic and interactionist domains that could be explored only by approaches that probed more deeply.