ABSTRACT

This chapter presents, with particular relevance to communication, a clear definition and discussion of the way reinforcement has been theorised, researched and applied in over a century of work. Reinforcement impacts on verbal behaviour, personal efficacy development and agency. The term reinforcement has an extensive usage across a range of areas of research and theory. In addition, reinforcement is often seen to be synonymous with feedback. Reinforcement approaches have been used in a wide variety of communication applications to change, modify or expunge certain behaviours deemed to need modification and/or improvement. In relation to communication and language, the behaviourist theory of language development argued that children learn language through interaction where utterances are reinforced in their environment by parents and others with whom they interact. As early as 1998, R. S. Sutton and A. G. Barto published an introduction to the field of Reinforcement Learning.