Re: Human language acquisition

JL: The point is that children's acquisition of language has not been
demonstrated to be operant behaviour under stimulus control. If it is
operating then why don't words that are physically similar (i.e.
pronunciation, spelling, position in sentence) generally have similar
grammatical properties or meanings?

GS: Similar won’t cut it especially when there are differential
contingencies in place. In other words, in many modalities, our
discriminative abilities are just too good. What about homonyms? Or
excessively noisy environments, or when the person’s speech is slurred, or
just somewhat careless? Here of course the role of context* comes into
play - stimulus control is contextual. We "tell the difference" between
homonyms by context, and "understand" (respond appropriately to)
incompletely sensed verbal behavior by context. Behavior analysis, of
course, directly produces and investigates such contextual stimulus control,
whereas cognitive experiments simply take advantage of people’s unanalyzed
history and attribute these effects to internal surrogates. In any
event.....it is curious that mostly you focus on the listener. Anyhow, sorry
I can’t summarize 70 years of research in stimulus control, or Skinner’s 400
page book, in a few paragraphs. Even if I could, you would view it as such a
shallow interpretation when compared to the "depth" of the cognitive
"explanation."

JL:Where does it apply?


GS: Virtually everywhere. Certainly the listener’s repertoire (isolated from
his or her speaker’s repertoire) is all stimulus control except where the
speaker’s verbal behavior exerts an eliciting function (Pavlovian
conditioned stimulus). The speaker’s behavior is under stimulus control of
aspects of the public environment, and this strengthens the parts of the
utterance that roughly correspond to "content words," but the final product
(especially in written composition) involves self-editing (i.e., the private
emission and modification of the verbal behavior, which involves the
stimulus control of behavior by the privately emitted behavior). Again,
sorry that I can’t summarize Verbal Behavior for you.

*Since you are talking about the listener’s behavior here I won’t say that
it is a matter of "intraverbals," but the effect is similar. The listener is
"prepared to hear certain words" because doing so has been reinforced in the
presence of certain other words (i.e. stimulus control). This is the sort of
historical determinant of the effects observed in cognitive experiments
where, for example, a person says "true" with shorter latency when the test
sentence is "A collie is a dog" than when it is "A collie is a mammal"
(oh....that’s right.....there must be a semantic web in their brain or
alleged mind).

"Joe Legris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Glen M. Sizemore wrote:
>
>  >
>  > JL: But this suggests that the difference between a dog barking in
> response
>  > to his name being called and a child responding correctly to "Will the
>  > boy the birthday party is for please stand up!" is simply a matter of
>  > degree.
>  >
>  > GS: Is the dog’s barking an operant under stimulus control of its
> name being
>  > called? If so, then the two behaviors mentioned have something in
> common -
>  > assuming the child’s behavior is operant behavior under stimulus
> control. I
>  > don’t have any problem with this.
>  >
>
> The point is that children's acquisition of language has not been
> demonstrated to be operant behaviour under stimulus control. If it is
> operating then why don't words that are physically similar (i.e.
> pronunciation, spelling, position in sentence) generally have similar
> grammatical properties or meanings? Where does it apply?
>
> [snip]
>
>
> -- 
> Joe Legris
>
>