CHAPTER 2
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
The term “Behaviorism” was the science of observable behaviour according to John Broadus Watson (1903). In Behaviorism, Only behaviour that could be observed, recorded and measured was of any real value for the study of humans and animals and its goal is to explain relationships between antecedent conditions (stimuli), behaviour (responses), and consequences (reward, punishment, or neutral effect).
This theory was more concerned with the effects of stimuli because Watson derived much of his thinking from classical conditioning of Pavlov’s animal studies and this is also referred to as “learning through stimulus substitution”. It is a reference to the substitution of one stimulus for another. For example, the ringing of a bell eventually produced the same response as food for Pavlov’s dog.
Watson is best known in applying his theory, Behaviorism into child development because he strongly believed that a that a child’s development is the factor that shapes behaviours over their genetic makeup or
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syntax. For instance, when hearing the utterance ‘the girl kicks the boy’, we need more than just the meaning of each word to understand the whole sentence. The listener has to understand the relation between the verb and both the subject and the object. Learning words requires memorizing specific elements of the input (e.g. girl, boy) and representing them in a format that allows their recognition and distinction from other words (e.g. boy vs. toy), whereas learning regularities about syntactic structures implies the ability to extract relations between elements of the input (e.g. whether the verb precedes or follows the object) and generalize them to new