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Three Myths from the Language Acquisition Literature

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Abstract

Three popular assertions have hindered the promotion of an empiricist approach to language acquisition: (a) that Brown and Hanlon (1970) claimed to offer data that parents do not reinforce their children’s grammatically; (b) that Brown and Hanlon also claimed to offer data that parents do not provide negative evidence (i.e., corrective feedback) for ungrammaticality; and (c) that Gold (1967) claimed to offer a formal proof showing that, without negative evidence, a child cannot acquire a language solely from environmental input. In this paper I offer introductory comments on the nature-nurture distinction (including interactionism, and the nativists’ claim to have found a gene for language). Next I debunk the three aforementioned assertions by arguing that the authors (Brown & Hanlon; Gold) never made the claims attributed to them; review evidence on the role of reinforcement and corrective feedback in language acquisition; and offer some concluding comments.

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  1. Kohala Educational Services, USA

    Ted Schoneberger

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  1. Ted Schoneberger
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Correspondence to Ted Schoneberger.

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Schoneberger, T. Three Myths from the Language Acquisition Literature. Analysis Verbal Behav 26, 107–131 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03393086

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