ABSTRACT
Almost the only factor in language acquisition upon which both linguists and behaviorists can agree is the human’s ability to generalize. Guess and Baer (1973) note that “in view of the size of the behavioral repertoire … some such … self-generating approach is essential” [p. 8]; McNeill (1970), states that “somehow linguistic abstractions are … developed by children” [p. 152]. After this point major differences concerning how language is acquired result from the differing aims and methods of theory construction in the two fields. Behaviorism is potentially committed to an inductive approach to construction of a theory of the development of language performance, while linguistics is concerned with constructing a deductive theory of the development of language competence (Chomsky, 1965). “Theories of performance and competence … deal with different topics” [McNeill, 1970, p. 146]. Problems arise, as the linguistic literature makes apparent, because a theory of competence must be based on, and supported by, data from language performance. While explicitly denying the relevance of environmental variables to the development of language competence (McNeill, 1970, p. 46), linguists continually encounter their influence in performance-based data, and attempt to relate such performance variables to the development of competence. This problem does not arise for behaviorists, who are not concerned with what a child “knows” about language, but only with the “production and organization of spoken language” [Guess & Baer, 1973, p. 9], with the development of “working language” (Hart & Risley, 1974). This concern with working language restricts the area of investigation within the topic, performance, to examination of how a child’s language production interacts with its environment in ways which lead to increases in the rate and complexity of that production.
