Children learn language entirely by imitating adults and being rewarded for correct speech.

Behaviorism offered an appealingly concrete account of language. Children heard adults speak, copied what they heard, and had successful utterances reinforced while unsuccessful ones faded away. B. F. Skinner’s 1957 Verbal Behavior placed language within this broader framework of learned behavior.

Children themselves exposed the limits of a pure copying model. They routinely produce sentences they have never heard and make rule-like errors such as applying a regular grammatical pattern where adults use an exception. Such mistakes are poor imitation but good evidence of generalization. The famous Skinner–Chomsky debate helped push language research toward mechanisms capable of generating new structure rather than merely reproducing rewarded phrases.

Modern accounts are more pluralistic than either side of that early dispute. Imitation, reinforcement, social interaction, statistical learning, memory, cognition, and biological constraints all contribute. The superseded claim is that imitation and reward by themselves are a complete explanation.