Abstract
Language acquisition has been a contentious topic among linguists, psycholinguists, and behaviorists for decades. Although numerous theories of language acquisition have surfaced, none have sufficiently accounted for the subtleties of the language that children acquire. The present study attempts to explain the role of modeling and automatic reinforcement in the acquisition of the passive voice. Six children, ages 3 to 5, participated in this study. The results indicated that the children began using the passive voice only after the experimenter modeled passive sentences. Furthermore, the usage of the passive voice increased with repeated exposure to the experimenter’s verbal behavior. Given that the children were not explicitly reinforced, it is proposed that their behavior was automatically reinforced for using the passive voice.
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I would like to thank Dr. Barry Lowenkron for all of his patience and guidance in helping me to complete my thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. David Palmer for providing the materials and information necessary to complete the research, and So-Young-Yoon of the Hawthorne Country Day School for preparing the drawings. I want to acknowledge B. F. Skinner’s remarkable work on the analysis of verbal behavior. I would also like to thank all of the children and their families who participated in this experiment for their time, support, and cooperation.
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Wright, A.N. The Role of Modeling and Automatic Reinforcement in the Construction of the Passive Voice. Analysis Verbal Behav 22, 153–169 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03393036
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03393036