Which school of learning believed that language, whether verbal or non-verbal,…

Different schools of learning explain language acquisition through different underlying mechanisms — some emphasise the communicative purpose language serves, some emphasise internal cognitive structures and mental processing, some emphasise social interaction, and one school, Behaviourism, explains it purely through stimulus-response conditioning: a learner's verbal or non-verbal response is repeated and reinforced until it becomes a fixed habit, with no separate innate faculty required.

The phrase 'takes place through the process of habit formation' is the defining signature of the Behaviourist school, associated with B.F. Skinner's account of verbal behaviour — language, whether spoken (verbal) or gestural (non-verbal), is learned exactly like any other behaviour: through repeated stimulus-response-reinforcement cycles that build it into a habit. This directly identifies the school being described as Behaviourist.

The other three schools describe a different mechanism:

• Functionalist: explains language through the communicative purpose or function it serves (requesting, informing), not through conditioned habit formation.

• Cognitivist: attributes language to internal mental structures and processing — active mental construction rather than externally conditioned habit — explicitly opposing a pure habit-formation account.

• Interactionalist: attributes language development to social interaction and exchange between the learner and the environment, not to a conditioned habit.

None of these three describe language as arising purely from habit formation, so Behaviourist is the school the question describes.