Chomsky Vs. Skinner

Chomsky Vs. Skinner

Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky proposed in the 1960's that the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) concept is instinctive and enables an infant to acquire and produce language. This theory suggests that humans are bore with the instinct to acquire language. 

The main argument in favour of the LAD in the argument from the poverty of the stimulus, which argues that unless children have significant innate knowledge of grammar they would be unable to learn language as quickly as they do.
The idea of Chomsky's linguistic theory is that the ability to learn language is all biologically determined by every individual human and therefore is genetically transmitted by parents to their child(ren). Because of this he argues that all humans share a very similar linguistic structure despite an cultural differences. In this his theory is very different to that of the behaviourist B.F.Skinner, who instead argued that language is learnt through reinforcement.

Skinner

Skinner proposed the the operant conditioning chamber, which is also nick named the Skinner Box. He believed that a humans free will was actually an illusion and a humans behaviour was a result of certain actions being repeated over and over along with reinforcement, furthermore he also believed that any action a human made was only the result of the consequences of that action. For example, he believed that if the consequences were bad then the action would not be repeated again this is likely to be then cancelled out by negative reinforcement, however if the consequences were good then there would be a high chance of that action being repeated this is because it would likely be encouraged by those around the infant, which lead to positive reinforcement which for an infant would be praise, laughter and attention from their caregiver. This is what Skinner called the principle of reinforcement. This evidence then implied that this is how infants learn language and not through an innate ability.