ied upon to explain language acquisition" (1989, pp. 192-3). Implicitly, neither can the abilities of a given trainer positioned as the expert in language or in any mode of behavior that is to be acquired be relied upon as an infallible gauge. This appears to be a failure of the behaviorist model in general.
The linguistic approach to explain language acquisition relies on the idea that human beings possess a kind of internal grammar that drives the process of language development. Understanding language, on this view, is a matter of sorting out or syntactically organizing linguistic structures so as to arrive at meaning. This leads to the assumption of "generative grammar," which is marked by the existence of certain patterns of linguistic rules that are innate in human beings and that are "discoverable from the raw linguistic data provided by the environment" (Bohannon and Luebecker, 1989, p. 196). The weakness of this theory is that it presumes syntactic organization will take place irrespective of the quality of language to which the learner is exposed. In other words, it is structure-driven and does not appear to take sufficient account of "some form of interaction with mature language users, rather than just exposure to their speech" (Bohannon and Luebecker, 1989, p. 199). In the linguistic view, therefore, the importance of environment to language development is minimized, and this assumption is
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