  Given his view that knowing a language is just a matter of having a  certain set of behavioral dispositions, Skinner believed that  learning a language just amounts to acquiring that set of  dispositions. He argued that this occurs through a process that he  called operant conditioning. (‘Operants’ are  behaviors that have no discernible law-like relation to particular  environmental conditions or ‘eliciting stimuli.’ They are to be contrasted with ‘respondents,’ which are reliable  or reflex responses to particular stimuli. Thus, blinking when  someone pokes at your eye is a respondent; episodes of infant  babbling are operants.) Skinner held that most human verbal behaviors are operants: they start off unconnected with any particular stimuli. However, they can acquire connections to stimuli (or other behaviors) as a result of conditioning. In conditioning, the behavior in  question is made more (or in some paradigms less) likely to occur in  response to a given environmental cue by the imposition of an  appropriate ‘schedule of reinforcement’: rewards or  punishments are given or withheld as the subject's response to the  cue varies over time.