Chomsky and Skinner

Chomsky

The language acquisition device (LAD) was first proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960's, it was a hypothetic module of the brain to account the innate way children formed language acquisition.
The LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which let the child acquire and actually produce the language they speak. Chomsky's theory asserts that children have an innate capacity for acquiring language. The main argument in the LAD is poverty of the stimulus, which argues that unless children have significant innate knowledge of grammar they would be unable to pick up the language in speak, and would be unable to learn the language as quickly as they do, although there has never been negative evidence. Chomsky abandoned the LAD idea in favour of Universal Grammar. This also applies with the nature/nurture debate, whether language is learned through their up bringing, or whether they are born with it.

This theory links into today's language acquisition as there is still a debate whether language is learnt through innate capacity and it is just developed over time (between 0-36 months) or whether the help from people around and things such a TV shows or school, influence the way children talk to certain people (authority figures) and the way they act around children of their own age and those of authority, and whether or not it helps them learn the words they pick up first so quickly.


Skinner

American behavioural psychologist. Skinner invented operant conditioning, which is learning through positive and negative reinforcement and then cancelling out the behaviour (ignoring) completely. he strongly believed that human free will was actually an illusion and any human behaviour was a action of repeating the same thing over and over again until they learnt what is good and what is unacceptable in society. If actions were bad then they would not be repeated and cancelled out or would have negative reinforcement (eg. telling off) but if they results were good they would be reinforced in a positive way (eg. well done or given something). Skinner pioneered modern behaviour along with Watson who conditioned 'Little Albert' to fear fluffy animals by pairing the sight of it with a loud noise and Pavlov who looked into salivation of a dog when it saw food.
Skinner discovered and then advanced the rate of response as a dependant variable in psychology, and his worked was highly influenced by schedules of reinforcement.

This theory links in as it shows that by positive or negative reinforcement on anyone (animals or children) they will eventually learn what is right and wrong. For example if a child does something good the care giver will say well done or something positive with a cheerful tone of voice and the child will laugh and carry on doing it, whereas if they did something bad the care giver would either ignore the matter or give a negative reinforcement such as "that wasn't very nice", with a lower and sadder tone of voice, in which the child will pick up on that and after time not do it again.