Språkutvikling og verbal atferd hos normalutviklede barn

Abstract

Over the last decades there have been disagreements between the different research communities on what is the right explanation on language acquisitions. Several directions, like radical behaviorists and psycholinguists, have argued that they have the best explanation. Radical behaviorists rest their explanation on Skinners view, that verbal behavior is behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons. Psycholinguists agree with Chomsky, who claims that because we are humans we think in a certain way, and that way of thinking determines our language. Article 1 is a theoretical article describing psycholinguistic and radical behaviorism, and some issues who radical behaviorists think influence language acquisitions. Those issues are reinforcement, imitation and modeling. Moreover, a brief description of normal language acquisition, delineated with both linguistic and behavioral terms will be given. Finally in article 1, there will be given a dive into studies about acquisitions on the passive voice, which will form the foundation for article 2. Article 2 describes a replication of one of the studies described in article 1 (Wright, 2006). Six normally developing children age three-to-five years participated in the study. The participants were exposed to six phases; one baseline phase, two modeling phases, two training phases and one generalization phase. The result indicates that none of the participants used the passive voice before modeling, and that the use of the passive voice increased after modeling, this despite the fact that reinforcement was given contingent on the use of passive voice. Since the participants did not receive reinforcement for using passive voice, it is proposed that the use of passive voice was automatic reinforced