ABSTRACT
Until the 1970s, developing children’s language was dominated by two main theories. Skinner’s behaviourist theory (Skinner 1957) suggests that language is learnt in response to a stimulus that gives a pleasant reward. For example, a child says drink and is rewarded by a drink. Chomky’s grammarian theory (1957, 1965) suggests the grammar of language is crucial to expressing oneself successfully. This means it is essential to know the correct order of words in a sentence to get a message across, e.g. ‘the cat was on the basket’, differs in meaning from ‘the basket was on the cat’.
