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... the child use positive and negative reinforcement. A child must hear speech before it can repeat it and before it can be reinforced. Jean Piaget a psychologist not a linguist influenced the Behaviourist theory. His research on three children in an orphanage suggests that a child goes through stages of understanding, thinking, planning organising, interpreting linking and recalling. Piaget believed there are fixed stages of cognitive development, one cannot be missed out, the brain switches on when the brain grows. A child needs to understand before it can use a particular grammatical structure. Criticisms of the theory suggest that children are creative in their use of language, applying grammatical rules for sentence and word structures that are not reinforced. Adding incorrect plurals is a common mistake children make. Berko (1958)"wug's" experiment showed children applied the plural "s" to the unknown noun which indicated children were creative and applied grammatical rules. ...