2. Behaviorism and Mentalism
• Behaviorism is based on observation and empirical evidence, whereas
mentalism relies on pure belief. The theory of behaviorism suggests
that behavior is simply a conditioned response to certain triggers, or
stimuli, that occurs without regard to feelings.
• By contrast, mentalism is a theory based on the perceived power of
thought processes, learned through experience or through an
apprenticeship with an experienced mentalist.
3. Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990)
• Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything. B.F. Skinner
• American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social
philosopher.[2][3][4][5] He was a professor of psychology at Harvard
University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.
4. B.F. Skinner
• Behaviorist Skinner and his followers are known as
behaviorist. According to them language learning is a
process known as operant conditioning.
• Conditioned Behavior - behavior in which the training is
repeated. Operant – voluntary behavior; it is the result
of the learner’s own free will, and it is not forced by any
person or thing from the outside.
• The learner demonstrates the new behavior first as a
response to a system of reward or punishment, and
finally as an automatic response.
5. Behaviorist Approach
• They put a rat in a box containing a bar.
• If it presses the bar, it is rewarded with a pallet of food. Nothing
forces it to push the bar. •
• It probably does accidentally at the first time. When the rat finds
out that food will arrive, it will press the bar again. •
• Task was made difficult; the rat only gets rewarded with food if it
presses the bar while a light is flashed.
• At first the rat was puzzled but eventually learns the trick.
• To make it more difficult, the rat can only receive food if it
presses the bar more than once.
• • After initial confusion it learned to do so. And so on, and so on.
6. Operant conditioning
• In Operant conditioning, reinforcement plays a vital
role. •
• TWO kinds of Reinforcement:
• 1. Positive Reinforcement (Praise and rewards)
• 2. Negative Reinforcement (Rebuke and punishments)
7. Noam Chomsky
• Noam Chomsky explicitly rejects the behaviorists’
position that language should be thought of as verbal
behavior, arguing that it should be thought of as
knowledge held by those who use language.
• Chomsky suggests that the learner of any language has
an inbuilt learning capacity of language that enables
each learner to construct a kind of personal theory or
set of rules about the language based on very limited
exposure to language.
8. Mentalist
• Chomsky and his mentalist followers claim that a child learns his
first language through cognitive learning.
• They claim that language is governed by rules, and is not a
haphazard thing, as Skinner and his followers would claim.
• According to Chomsky, the child is born with a mental capacity
for working out the underlying system to the jumble of sounds
which he hears.
• He constructs his own grammar and imposes it on all the sound
reaching his brain.
9. Mentalist
• The mental grammar is part of his cognitive framework, and
nothing he hears is store in his brain until he has matched it
against what he already knows and found a ‘correct’ place for it
within this framework.
• Chomsky argues that language is so complex that it is almost
incredible that it can be acquired by a child in a so short of time.
• He says that a child is born with some innate mental capacity
which helps the child to process all the language which he hears.
Mentalism • Language learning is innate ability • Mental (own
rules) and Grammatical sentences
