Traditional behaviorists view language as behavior and believe that language learning is simply a matter of imitation and habit formation. A child imitates the sounds and patterns of the people around him; people recognize the child’s attempts and reinforce the attempts by responding differently, the child repeats the right sounds or patterns to get the reward (reinforcement). The child learns the language gradually in much the same way as habit-forming. So imitation and practice are preliminary, discrimination and generalization are key to language development in this theory.

The behaviorist theory of child language acquisition offers a reasonable account of how children acquire some of the regular and routine aspects of the language, yet how they acquire more complex grammatical structures of the language requires a different explanation. And the behaviorist view fails to recognize the logical problem of language acquisition. Its inadequacy is how to explain children acquire complex language system. In addition to the fact that sometimes children are very much in charge of the conversation and the activity with the adult(s), children seem to pick out patterns and generalize them to new contexts. They create new forms or new uses of words until they finally figure out how the forms are used by adults.

In behaviorist approach, language environment plays a major role in providing both language models to be imitated and the necessary feedbacks among which the positive reinforcement or reward encourages children’s efforts and facilitates the “correct” learning of the language while the negative feedback discourages children to repeat the “mistakes”.