The basic theories of language acquisition
Contents:
HS First Language Acquisition, 12 entries in the bibliography, language: Most of the concepts and theories explaining how native languages are acquired go back to three different approaches put forward by Burrhus Federic Skinner, Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, either by using their ideas as a starting point or by rejecting them and formulating a new or altered Hypothesis.
This paper will try to present those three basic theories, also taking into account the contexts out of which they emerged, as to fully understand linguistic, like any other scientific, views and theories, they have always to be evaluated with respect to the scientific and cultural background they appeared in.
First it will try to show how Skinners concept of 'verbal behavior' with respect to language acquisition emerged in the development of behaviouristic theories. This will be followed by Chomsky's criticism of Skinner's ideas, leading to his own theory of language and language acquisition, which will be presented. Jean Piaget offers a cognitive approach to the question. His view will be described before comparing nativist and cognitivist ideas, concerning the points whether or not innate structures exist and in how far linguistic and cognitive development are interrelated, taking the opposed views of Piaget and Chomsky, the forerunners of many other important linguists, as an example.
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Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. The basic theories of language acquisition. Set up a giveaway. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Learn more about Amazon Prime. It was termed the critical period hypothesis and since then there has been a few case examples of individuals being subject to such circumstances such as the girl known as Genie who raised in an abusive environment to age 13, which didn't allow her to develop language skills. Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who was famous for his four stages of cognitive development for children, which included the development of language.
However, children do not think like adults and so before they can begin to develop language they must first actively construct their own understanding of the world through their interactions with their environment. A child has to understand a concept before he or she can acquire the particular language which expresses that concept. For example, a child first becomes aware of a concept such as relative size and only afterward do they acquire the words and patterns to convey that concept. Essentially it is impossible for a young child to voice concepts that are unknown to them; therefore, once a child learns about their environment, then they can map language onto their prior experience.
An infant's experience of a cat is that it meows, is furry and eats from a bowl in the kitchen; hence they develop the concept of cat first and then learn to map the word "kitty" onto that concept. Language is only one of the many human mental or cognitive activities, and many cognitivists believe that language emerges within the context of other general cognitive abilities like memory, attention and problem solving because it is a part of their broader intellectual development.
However, according to Goodluck , once language does emerge it is usually within certain stages and children go through these stages in a fixed order that is universal in all children.
Piaget's cognitive theory states that children's language reflects the development of their logical thinking and reasoning skills in stages, with each period having a specific name and age reference. Vygotsky's social interaction theory incorporates nurture arguments in that children can be influenced by their environment as well as the language input children receive from their care-givers. Although the theories of Skinner, Chomsky and Piaget are all very different and very important in their own contexts, they don't necessarily take into account the fact that children don't encounter language in isolation.
The child is a little linguist analyzing language from randomly encountered adult utterances. The interaction theory proposes that language exists for the purpose of communication and can only be learned in the context of interaction with adults and older children. It stresses the importance of the environment and culture in which the language is being learned during early childhood development because this social interaction is what first provides the child with the means of making sense of their own behaviour and how they think about the surrounding world.
According to Williamson , children can eventually use their own internal speech to direct their own behaviour in much the same way that their parents' speech once directed their behaviour.
Two Theories of Language Acquisition - Serious Science
This tailored articulation used by care-givers to young children to maximize phonemic contrasts and pronunciation of correct forms is known as child-directed speech CDS. Vygotsky also developed the concepts of private speech which is when children must speak to themselves in a self guiding and directing way- initially out loud and later internally and the zone of proximal development which refers to the tasks a child is unable to complete alone but is able to complete with the assistance of an adult.
The attention and time that a mother spends talking about topics that the child is already focused on highly correlates with early vocabulary size. The utterances of the mother and father during the activities are ritualized and predictable so that the child is gradually moved to an active position where they take over the movements of the care-taker and eventually the ritualized language as well.
Basically the care-giver is providing comprehensible contexts in which the child can acquire language Mason, Adults adapt their behaviour towards children to construct a protected world in which the child is gradually inclined to take part in a growing number of scenarios and scripts and in this way the child is led gradually further and further into language. The usage-based theory of language suggests that children initially build up their language through very concrete constructions based around individual words or frames on the basis of the speech they hear and use.
Basically this means, according to Tomasello the developer of the theory, that children learn language from their language experiences and a language structure emerges from language use. Constructions gradually become more general and more abstract during the third and fourth years of life and grammar emerges as the speakers of a language create linguistic constructions out of recurring sequences of symbols Tomasello, Research by Saxton indicates that the more often a linguistic form occurs in the input, the more often it is experienced by the child and the stronger the child's representation of it becomes.
It will then be activated more easily when used on subsequent occasions.
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Linguistic forms with high token frequency will be learned early and lead to more strongly entrenched linguistic representations and seem to protect the child from error. Token frequency also has a strong influence on child learning; there is often a close relationship between adult input and child output Saxton, Optimality Theory OT was originally proposed by Prince and Smolensky and has subsequently been further developed by other researchers.
OT suggests that the observed forms of language arise from the interaction between conflicting constraints and like other models of linguistics, contain an input and an output and a relation between the two. A constraint is considered optimal if it incurs the least serious violations of a set of constraints, taking into account their hierarchical ranking. In optimality theory, the essence of both language learning in general learnability and language acquisition actual development children go through entails the rankings of constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language specific ranking of the target grammar McCarthy, [17].
The basic theories of language acquisition
OT is a development of generative grammar, a theory sharing the quest for universal principles such as universal grammar but differs from the theory proposed by Chomsky because optimality theory believes that these universal constraints are violable Kager, [18]. Languages are able to differ in their ranking of constraints by giving priorities to some constraints over others. Language acquisition can be described as the process of adjusting the ranking of these constraints that are considered universal:.
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There is also one family of constraints whose properties cut across all subdisciplinary domains, called the faithfulness constraints, which say that input and output are identical. Another term coined by the optimality theory is markedness , which refers to the continuum that language-universal and language-specific properties rest on, with completely unmarked properties being those found in virtually all languages and extremely marked properties being found quite rarely. However markedness embodies universality in a "soft" sense, with violations of universality existing between languages.
Young children learn their mother tongue rapidly and effortlessly, following similar developmental paths regardless of culture. How infants accomplish this task has become the focus of debate especially for Patricia Kuhl who has developed the Native Language Magnet Model to help explain how infants at birth can hear all the phonetic distinctions used in the world's languages.
According to Kuhl and colleagues , to acquire a language, infants have to discover which phonetic distinctions will be utilized in the language of their culture and do so by discriminating among virtually all the phonetic units of the world's languages. They used ERP brain measure of infants' native and non-native speech perception in infancy to predict language in the 2nd and 3rd years of life. Although we still remain capable of discriminating non-native phonetic contrasts as we age, it is at a reduced level when compared with native contrasts.
The idea that more than selection is involved in the development of phonetic perception has been clearly demonstrated by experimental findings showing that native language phonetic perception shows a significant improvement between 6 and 12 months of age. Previous studies had shown native language improvement after 12 months of age and before adulthood, but newer studies such as Kuhl's and colleagues has gone beyond selection in explaining developmental change in infants' perception of speech.
The Native Language Magnet Model NLM proposed by Kuhl , focuses on infants' native phonetic categories and how they could be structured through ambient language experience. Recently Kuhl's research has initiated the revision of the NLM and expanded the model to include native language neural commitment, which explains effects of language experience on the brain. Native language neural commitment describes the brain's early coding of language and how it affects our subsequent abilities to learn the phonetic scheme of a new language.
This is due to the fact that initial language exposure causes physical changes in neural tissue that reflects the statistical perceptual properties of language input Kuhl Another finding by Kuhl that has expanded the Native Language Magnet Model has been the research indicating that both native and non-native performances at 7 months of age predicted future language abilities but in opposite directions. Better native phonetic perception at 7 months of age predicted accelerated language development at between 14 and 30 months whereas better non-native performance at 7 months predicted slower language development at 14 and 30 months.
Results supported the view that the ability to discriminate non-native phonetic contrasts reflects the degree to which the brain remains in the initial state, open and uncommitted to native language speech patterns. Follow the link to get to the jeopardy challenge I created to test your knowledge on the theories of language acquisition. Try to answer correctly as many questions as you can, collecting jeopardy cash along the way until you meet the final jeopardy question at the end.
Answer the following essay questions to the best of your ability, using external sources if needed. You are a new theorist in the field of psycholinguistics and are trying to determine which perspective you are willing to take on how individuals acquire language. Being the great researcher that you are, you want your opinions to be based on evidence-based knowledge. Analyze and pick a position based on new evidence from within the field of linguistics defending why a certain perspective or theory better explains language acquisition.
First and second language acquisition. Research by Saxton indicates that the more often a linguistic form occurs in the input, the more often it is experienced by the child and the stronger the child's representation of it becomes. Since for his babblings and mutterings he is rewarded, this very reward reinforces further articulations of the same sort into grouping of syllables and words in a similar situation. Behaviorist theory, which is basically a psychological theory in its essence, founded by J. Token frequency also has a strong influence on child learning; there is often a close relationship between adult input and child output Saxton, The Native Language Magnet Model NLM proposed by Kuhl , focuses on infants' native phonetic categories and how they could be structured through ambient language experience.
Make sure to contrast your arguments against other theories or models and clearly support why other theorists should accept your view. If you want to be really ambitious you can even create your own theory or model to endorse your ideas, but make sure that you have evidence backing why you think your theory could hold up against any other.
Language acquisition has been a subject of debate for decades. It is so complex that there is really no single principle that can be applied to all. Its complexity has led to multiple theories and studies that has shaped our general perception and understanding towards it.
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Undeniably, all language acquisition theories acknowledge individual differences. In my observation, generally, individual learns language through a combination of innate and cognitive abilities Innateness l cognitive theory and external factors optimality theory.
So their exposure to people continuously interacting with them plays a great role in their language acquisition. As for me, one of factor that we should also focus are children born to multi-lingual parents. I have students who are native Arabic but cannot speak in their own language but can understand it but cannot converse with it.
They are more oriented to English language.