  His second big mistake was related to this one: he failed to  recognize that acquiring mastery of a language is not a matter of  being trained what to say. It's simply false, says Chomsky, that  “a careful arrangement of contingencies of reinforcement by the verbal community is a necessary condition of language  learning.” (1959:39) First, children learning language do not  appear to be being ‘conditioned’ at all! Explicit  training (such as a dog receives when learning to bark on command) is simply not a feature of language acquisition. It's only comparatively rarely that parents correct (or explicitly reward) their children's  linguistic sorties; children learn much of what they know about  language from watching TV or passively listening to adults; immigrant children learn a second language to native speaker fluency in the  school playground; and even very young children are capable of  linguistic innovation, saying things undreamt of by their parents. As Chomsky concludes: “It is simply not true that children can  learn language only through ‘meticulous care’ on the part of adults who shape their verbal repertoire through careful  differential reinforcement.” (1959:42)