Sounds like a twatty revision guide.
Language Acquisition Theory
My revision is going dreadfully. So I’ve decided to write a blog post about child language acquisition which I’m studying in English Language. It’s probably hit and miss so do correct me if I’m wrong.
Basically, there are four theories as to how language is acquired.
- Primarily there was Skinner who believed children learn language through imitation and reinforcement. This he called the BEHAVIOURIST THEORY. It’s the idea that children are exposed to adult language all the time and therefore will copy and learn from it. Regarding reinforcement, if we do something with pleasurable consequences we’re far more likely to do it again. So, if a child gets something he/she asked for, they’re going to do it again – and vice versa – if they’re unsuccessful in their request, the action will not be reinforced and repeated. Skinner later introduced his theory of positive and negative reinforcement: positivity is encouraging to the child whereas a negative or little response hurt their feelings and made them less inclined to do it again.
It’s a pretty sound theory. It definitely explains why children acquire the same accents as people around them and it accounts for how they gain lexical knowledge through being told the correct labels for things. However, this does not explain how they can form sentences they have never heard before. And think how terrible adult language is anyway –broken speech full of grammatical errors while children still learn the standard forms. - This is where CHOMSKY piped up and said SKINNER’S theory was rubbish and inaccurate. The crazy man conducted all his research on rats and pigeons! Chomsky came up with the NATIVIST THEORY; the idea that language is inbuilt as part of the brain – the part he coined the LAD (language acquisition device). He said that we have ‘universal grammar’ and that anyone creating language is constrained by these fundamental grammatical concepts. And so, by slow release of principles, we develop language. It’s a good idea because if you think, all children learn language even if they’re not good at anything else thus it must be innate. There was even some research carried out by BERKO called the ‘wug’ test, challenging children to pluralise a word (wug) that they had never heard; most did this successfully which suggests some inbuilt grammatical knowledge, right?
Nah, it’s nice but it underestimates the role of interaction and besides, there’s more to language than grammar! Essentially this theory does not take into consideration how pragmatics and lexis are acquired. I’m suggesting all knowledge is not in the brain waiting to be triggered (right word?); Plato perhaps theorised differently but neither he nor CHOMSKY could prove any of this.
LENNEBURG was a supporter of the NATIVIST THEORY and went further by proposing there is a critical period in which children acquire language – the first 5 years. If it’s missed the child may learn parts of language but never be fully competent. Think about feral children – they never develop properly. There’s also the study of Genie who was deprived of social contact until the age of 13; she was unable to learn speech beyond a very basic level which challenges the innate theory. - This leads onto the importance of social interaction with its theory called the SOCIAL INTERACTIONIST THEORY. This is the belief that a child’s language acquisition is dependent upon the contribution the caregiver. It makes sense because adults introduce new words and grammatical concepts to the child which they would not experience otherwise. Of course this is backed up by the acquisition of pragmatics and politeness principles. VYGOTSKY was a supporter of this theory; he believed that language guides and drives thought on. The idea that children need social interaction before going away and thinking about it – this would explain children ‘practicing’ language away from adults. CHOMSKY didn’t agree with this, repeating his belief adult language was ‘impoverished and ‘random’; a child would never learn any standard forms. Furthermore, parents tend to respond to the truth value of utterances rather than grammatical correctness – flawed! VYGOTSKY obviously didn’t take into consideration how other cultures do not promote social interaction yet the children still become articulate. Interestingly, CLARKE-STEWART found that children whose mothers talk more have a larger vocabulary which supports SOCIAL INTERACTION and IMITATION theories.
- The best theory is the COGNITIVE THEORY; the idea that thought must develop before language, children must have an understanding of what they’re saying before they say it. In support of this consider spatial adjectives – the concept of ‘big’ and ‘small’ must be scaled and comprehended before put into use. PIAGET was the main theorist behind this; he divided acquisition into stages (I’ll elaborate later) which reflect how a child must build on their understanding gradually to develop their linguistic skills. He expanded further, suggesting recognition of ‘object permanence’ was crucial to development. This means a child must understand that even when an object disappears out of sight, it still exists even though he/she cannot see it (generally happens around 18 months). The slight flaw being that children with cognitive difficulties can still use language beyond their understanding.
