ABSTRACT
The complexity of this process and the skills practitioners learn is perhaps one reason why the duration of human ‘childhood’ is so much longer than other animals. Language allows them to communicate with ourselves and each other in incredibly complex ways and leads them to behave differently to other animals. The main aspect of the form of learning is the ability to relate different stimuli and events to one another, independent of their actual relations or formal characteristics. Understanding the internal events experienced by verbal organisms, such as thinking and language, has posed a much bigger challenge for the science of behaviourism down the years, although it is beyond doubt that acquiring language represents a form of learning that transforms all other forms of learning. Humans have an almost unique ability to bestow additional functions upon stimuli and events within their environment simply by making sounds with their mouths.
