1957- Behaviourism - B.F Skinner wrote a book called 'Verbal behaviour'. He decided that children aquire language based on positive reinforcement. He said that we are all born as 'tabula rasa' (meaning blank slate), and that children learn language by receiving positive reinforcement when they communicate with words correctly. Skinner called this the 'Operant conditioning theory'. Children (according to Skinner) learn language through a simple process of imitation and reinforcement, and he claimed that no complicated internal mechanisms were needed for language and that a child learning language was no different from a rat learning to press levers (he enjoyed experimenting with rodents).
1965 - Cognitivism/Universal grammer - Chomsky opposed Skinner's idea with the theory of Universal grammer: the innate biological properties of the human brain which are responsible for children's rapid and overwhelmingly successful aquisition of a native language - without any obvious effort during the first few years of life.
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