Language Behavior

Language Behavior describes a behaviorist theory on how humans develop language. B.F. Skinner was a behaviorist who was interested in language acquisition in humans. He proposed that language, like any other skill, was gained by reinforcing responses from the environment. It's a process of building language skills on top of each other as a result from interacting with the environment. Desirable sounds made by infants are reinforced and these build on each other and eventually form the ability to speak languages.

An example of how this works is when a baby is making garbled sounds to its parent. When the baby makes a sound that seems like a word (mama, dada, baba) the parent will respond by repeating the sound and giving the child affection and encouragement for saying the 'word'. This positive reinforcement (hyperlink?) encourages the child to repeat the sound. This occurs with more and more words which eventually will become sentences and phrases.