Link and Reflection

The topic that interested me the most this week was the debate about language acquisition during the cognitive revolution. While we were learning about Noam Chomsky's language acquisition device theory and how it opposes Skinner, I was fascinated with the differences between the two. Chomsky's theory makes perfect sense, and I wonder how Skinner completely overlooked these ideas. In my opinion, behaviorism was simply too narrow of a scope to view psychology and it limited research far too much. Skinner MUST have considered the ideas that Chomsky presented because it is so obvious and true. However, Skinner's ideas are clearly lacking important elements that Chomsky discovered. I've discussed my 3 year old cousin on a previous blog post, and I'll refer to him again here. I got him a mini-guitar for Christmas and when he opened the gift he screamed, "How did you know I wanted a buitar? I seeed one of these at the store!" It was funny at the moment because of the words he mispronounced, but it's a great example of Chomsky's theory. There's no way that my cousin was reinforced in the words he said in that sentence. A buitar? Seeed? Sorry Skinner, but I just can't see you point of view. I am very happy that we've moved beyond behaviorism so that research doesn't have to be limited and narrow. Below is a link that provides a pretty cool flow-chart of Chomsky's language/grammar acquisition device, and it has some quotes from Chomsky about his views on bheaviorism.

http://academics.tjhsst.edu/psych/oldPsych/language/chomsky.html

Seth