15. What are Noam Chomsky’s arguments against the behaviorist perspective on language acquisition?

Critiquing Skinner’s (1957) book on verbal behaviour, Chomsky (1959) made the assertion that the behaviourist perspective cannot account for what came to be known as “the logical problem of language acquisition” (see, e.g., Baker & McCar- thy, 1981) – or “the fact that children come to know more about the structure of their language than they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language they hear” (Lightbown & Spada, 2013, p. 20). That is, children might be exposed to parts of language – sometimes complete phrases in themselves, sometimes partially complete, sometimes accurate, sometimes not.

However, just like individual dominoes that can be put together in specific combinations, children learn how to put these isolated components of language together both successfully and correctly so as to form a complete whole without necessarily having been exposed to all the linguistic permutations. (Cook, 1985, pp. 2–3, provided some interesting illustrative examples of this.)

Chomsky argued that, if it is the case that L1 users can do this successfully, language acquisition cannot simply be put down to imitation or repetition. Something else must be contributing. Chomsky concluded that this “something else” is the child’s innate ability – children can think and reason for themselves; they can construct correct patterns out of the individual bits that they have been exposed to.

References: 

Chomsky, N. (1959). Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Language, 35(1), 26–58.

Cook, V. (1985). Chomsky’s Universal Grammar and second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 6(1), 2–18.

East, M. (2021). Foundational principles of task-based language teaching (p. 214). Taylor & Francis.

Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. (2013). How languages are learned (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Copley Publishing Group.