... which a baby cries with hunger, pain and anger at the early stages and then progresses on to cooing and babbling is reinforced by the parents, in particular the mother, by rewards such as a smile or attention. Both Skinner and Bandura (1963) believed that this behaviourist perspective on language was based on observation and imitation by the child, although this has later been criticised by Brown and Hanlon as their studies of parent child interaction showed parents often reward of incorrect utterances and are also not able to reinforce all the utterances a child will use. These very early stages of language acquisition are the same the world over. De Villiers and De Villiers (1978) also stated that during this prelinguistic stage of babbling, babies produce every known phoneme that occurs in any human language. This is a unit of sound which is narrowed down by the parent to ...

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