Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych
Exam Review. At the end of the unit on
learning theory we started to see
situations where the behaviorist
explanation for learning didn't quite
work. There's types of learning that it
doesn't really apply to. So we saw this
with latent learning and the idea of
cognitive maps. We saw it with
observational learning, the idea of
vicarious reinforcement, where we
can learn without being directly
reinforced or punished and we saw it
with the idea we can learn about
categories of things, abstract learning,
and that we can have insight where we're
able to solve problems without using
trial and error behavior, without
needing to get rewarded or punished for
certain behaviors. We were able to sort
of think through and solve problems
using internal mental representations.
One thing that we sort of skipped
over in that section was language and
how we acquire language. Language is
really all about mental representations
right? We take these arbitrary sounds, we
assign the meaning and they allow us to
represent things in an internal mental
way that's not directly tied to our
observable behavior. This means
language is going to be really hard to
explain using a behaviorist explanation
of how we learn. Now BF Skinner tried to
do this in 1957, he published a book
called Verbal Behavior and in this book
he laid out a behaviorist explanation
for how language acquisition would occur.
The essential idea would be that
reinforcement and punishment would apply
to language use, so that if you learn to
say words correctly you get reinforced
and if you don't then you get punished
or ignored and as a result it's
reinforcement that allows language to
develop. If you're a young child
and you learn how to say "cookie" now you
can ask for cookies and get them and
that's rewarding and so that's going to
encourage you to learn how to say cookie
correctly but, obviously that's a
simplification, but the idea here
don't really work for a lot of
situations and there's a lot about
language acquisition that doesn't seem
to follow the simple behaviorist ideas of
reinforcement and punishment. So in 1959
a linguist named Noam Chomsky wrote a
review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior
and Chomsky's review was fairly
devastating and he picked apart a lot of
ways that language acquisition doesn't
seem to follow the principles of operant
conditioning. I'll post a link in the
video description box where you can read
Chomsky's review. Now Chomsky suggested
that language is a different type of
learning, it doesn't follow those rules
and part of the reason for this was that
humans have a language acquisition
device. Now this isn't an actual device
or structure in the brain but rather
it's just a term for referring to the
idea that human brains must have some
sort of system or process that allows us
to acquire language and other
animals simply don't have this. So
you can use sort of operant conditioning
to teach your dog to maybe recognize a
few words but your dog is never going to
develop the full linguistic fluency that
a child will develop and this is because,
according to Chomsky, humans have this
language acquisition device and dogs
don't. Their brains just aren't designed
to acquire language the way that we are
even though they can, of course, learn
through operant conditioning. So in the
next few videos, we're going to look in a
little more detail at linguistics; the
study of language. We'll see how
language acquisition appears to be
different from other types of learning
and how this shows that human brains
appear to be designed to learn language.
Language seems to naturally emerge
in anyone who is exposed to it and this
makes it quite different from other
types of learning. You don't naturally
acquire calculus simply by being exposed
to it but language, you take a child
who's, you know, two years old and they're
already starting to use language and
this suggests that language is a unique
type of learning. This idea of a
language acquisition device suggests
that this is specific to humans and
human brains. Ok, so that's what we'll
be looking at in the next few videos. I
hope you found this helpful, if so, please
like the video and subscribe to the
channel for more. Thanks for watching!
