Théories of Language acquisition

Théories of L anguage acquisition.

Theory Central Idea Behaviourist Children imitate adults. Their correct utterances are reinforced Innateness Cognitive Interaction when the etwhatthe want or are raised. A child's brain contains special language-learning mechanisms at birth. Language is just one aspect of a child's overall intellectual develo ment. This theory emphasises the interaction between children and their care-givers. Individual with theo Skinner Chomsky Piaget Bruner.

Behaviourism. The behaviourist psychologists developed their theories while carrying out a series of experiments on animals . They observed that rats or birds, for example, could be taught to perform various tasks by encouraging habit-forming. Researchers rewarded desirable behaviour . This was known as positive reinforcement . Undesirable behaviour was punished or simply not rewarded - negative reinforcement..

The behaviourist B. F. Skinner then proposed this theory as an explanation for language acquisition in humans . In Verbal Behaviour (1957 ), he stated: " The basic processes and relations which give verbal behaviour its special characteristics are now fairly well understood. Much of the experimental work responsible for this advance has been carried out on other species, but the results have proved to be surprisingly free of species restrictions. Recent work has shown that the methods can be extended to human behaviour without serious modifications.".

Limitations of Behaviourism While there must be some truth in Skinner's explanation, there are many objections to it..

Language is based on a set of structures or rules, which could not be worked out simply by imitating individual utterances. The mistakes made by children reveal that they are not simply imitating but actively working out and applying rules. For example, a child who says " drinked “ instead of "drank" is not copying an adult but rather over-applying a rule . The child has discovered that past tense verbs are formed by adding a /d/ or /t/ sound to the base form. The "mistakes " occur because there are irregular verbs which do not behave in this way. Such forms are often referred to as intelligent mistakes or virtuous errors.

The vast majority of children go through the same stages of language acquisition. There appears to be a definite sequence of steps. We refer to developmental milestones . Apart from certain extreme cases (see the case of Genie), the sequence seems to be largely unaffected by the treatment the child receives or the type of society in which s/he grows up..

Children are often unable to repeat what an adult says , especially if the adult utterance contains a structure the child has not yet started to use. The classic demonstration comes from the American psycholinguist David McNeill. The structure in question here involves negating verbs: Child : Nobody don't like me Mother : No, say, "Nobody likes me." Child : Nobody don't like me. (Eight repetitions of this dialogue) Mother : No, now listen carefully: say, "Nobody likes me." Child : Oh! Nobody don't likes me. (McNeil in T he Genesis of Language , 1966).

Few children receive much explicit grammatical correction. Parents are more interested in politeness and truthfulness . According to Brown, Cazden and Bellugi (1969): "It seems to be truth value rather than well-formed syntax that chiefly governs explicit verbal reinforcement by parents - which renders mildly paradoxical the fact that the usual product of such a training schedule is an adult whose speech is highly grammatical but not notably truthful." (cited in Lowe and Graham, 1998).

Innateness. Noam Chomsky published a criticism of the behaviourist theory in 1957. In addition to some of the arguments listed above, he focused particularly on the impoverished language input children receive. Adults do not typically speak in grammatically complete sentences. In addition, what the child hears is only a small sample of language..

Chomsky concluded that children must have an inborn faculty for language acquisition . According to this theory, the process is biologically determined the human species has evolved a brain whose neural circuits contain linguistic information at birth. The child's natural p redisposition to learn language is triggered by hearing speech and the child's brain is able to interpret what s/he hears according to the underlying principles or structures it already contains..