Question

Outline Chomsky's Influence On Behaviorism and psycholinguistics

Answer 1

Chomsky's most significant contribution towards behaviourism and psycholinguistics has been his critique and review of Skinner's book on verbal behavior. In his book, Skinner argued that language is just like any other complex behaviour which children learn through reinforcement and assocation. According to Chomsky, however, this explanation could not account for children's ability to form infinite number of sentences and rapidly acquire language during a specific period of development. As a result, Chomsky proposed the theory of Universal Grammar, which stated that we all possess a set of innate and biological grammatical categories that facilitate language development and processing.