Language Acquisition Flashcards
Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.
Theories of language acquisition
Various theories and approaches have been emerged over the years to study and analyze the process of language acquisition.
Imitation, Nativism or Behaviorism :
Based on the empiricist or behavioral approach
Innateness or Mentalism :
Based on the rationalistic or mentalist approach
Cognition :
Based on the cognitive-psychological approach
Motherese or Input:
Based on the maternal approach to language acquisition
Imitation
- Children start out as clean slates and language learning is process of getting linguistic habits printed on these slates
- Language Acquisition is a process of experience
- Language is a ‘conditioned behavior’
- Stimulus~ Response~ Feedback~ Reinforcement
Imitation main figure:
B. F.Skinner
Imitation :Children learn language step by step
Imitation~Repetition~Memorization~Controlled drilling~Reinforcement
Imitation: Reinforcement
Reinforcement can either be positive or negative
Imitation: Popular View
Children learn to speak by imitating the utterances heard around them and analogy
Children strengthen their responses by the repetitions, corrections, and other reactions that adults provide, thus language is practice based
Imitation: General perception
That there is no difference between the way one learns a language and the way one learns to do anything else
Imitation: Main focus
Is on inducing the child to behave with the help of mechanical drills and exercises
Two Kinds Of Evidence Used To Criticize Behaviorist Theory
- First Evidence: Based on the kind of language children produce
- Second Evidence: Based on what children do not produce
First Evidence: Based on the kind of language children produce
First piece of evidence taken from the way children handle irregular grammatical patterns
While encountering irregular items, there is a stage when they replace forms based on the regular patterns of language
Gradually they switch over to the process of ‘analogy’ – a reasoning process as they start working out for themselves
Second Evidence: Based on what children do not produce
The other evidence is based on the way children seem unable to imitate adult grammatical constructions exactly
Best known demonstration of this principle is provided by American Psycholinguist David McNeill (1933)
Thus, language acquisition is more a matter of maturation than of imitation
Nativist or Innateness Theory
Limitations of Behaviorist view of language acquisition led in 1960’s to the alternative ‘generative’ account of language
Children are born with an innate propensity for language acquisition, and that this ability makes the task of learning a first language easier than it would otherwise be.
The human brain is ready naturally for language in the sense when children are exposed to speech, certain general principles for discovering or structuring language automatically begin to operate
Nativist or Innateness Theory: Main Argument
Children must be born with an innate capacity for language development
Nativist or Innateness Theory: Main Figure
Bloomfield & Noam Chomsky
Chomsky originally theorized:
That children were born with a hard-wired language acquisition device (LAD) in their brains. He later expanded this idea into that of Universal Grammar
Universal Grammar (Chomsky):
A set of innate principles and adjustable parameters that are common to all human languages. The child exploits its LAD to make sense of the utterances heard around it, deriving from this ‘primary linguistic data’ – the grammar of the language
LAD is exploited:
To explain the remarkable speed with which children learn to speak, and the considerable similarity in the way grammatical patterns are acquired across different children and languages
According to Chomsky:
The presence of Universal Grammar in the brains of children allow them to deduce the structure of their native languages from & quot;mere exposure”.
Primary data is then used to make sentences or structures after a process of trial and error, correspond to those in adult speech
Two distinct views about how LAD functions: #1
LAD provides children with a knowledge of linguistic universals such as the existence of word order and word classes
Two distinct views about how LAD functions: #2
LAD provides children only general procedures for discovering language to be learned
Innate Theory is criticized for:
The role of adult speech can not be ruled out in providing a means of enabling children to work out the regularities of language for themselves
It has proved difficult to formulate the detailed properties of LAD in an uncontroversial manner, in the light of the changes in generative linguistic theory that have taken place in later years, and meanwhile, alternative accounts of the acquisition process have evolved
That there are principles of grammar that cannot be learned on the basis of positive input alone
The concept of LAD is unsupported by evolutionary anthropology which shows a gradual adaptation of the human body to the use of language, rather than a sudden appearance of a complete set of binary parameters (which are common to digital computers but not to neurological systems such as a human brain) delineating the whole spectrum of possible grammars ever to have existed and ever to exist.
The theory has several hypothetical constructs, such as movement, empty categories, complex underlying structures, and strict binary branching, that cannot possibly be acquired from any amount of input.
Mentalists’ emphasis on the rule-learning is over-enthusiastic
Chomsky (1965)
Provides a distinction between competence and performance – between the underlying ability which allows linguistic behavior to take place and the behavior itself
According to UG
The learner’s initial state is supposed to consist of a set of universal principles common to all human languages
Structure Dependency
This principle states that language is organized in such a way that it crucially depends on the structural relationships between elements in a sentence
Parameters
Determine the ways in which languages can vary
Head Parameter
Specifies the position of the head in relation to its compliments within phrases for different languages
Criticism of UG Theory
Linguistically, this approach’s primary concern is only syntax
Noam Chomsky (1957)
Published Syntactic Structures , in which he developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation — a deep structure and a surface structure
Surface Structure
Represents the Physical properties of language
The deep structure
Represented the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure (which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations .
Cognitive Theory: Main Argument
Language Acquisition must be viewed within the context of a child’s intellectual development
Cognitive Theory: Most influential figure
Genevan Psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) who proposed the model of cognitive development
Cognitive theory is criticized for:
It is highly difficult to show precise correlations between specific cognitive behaviors and linguistic features at the very early stage of language acquisition as the children become linguistically and cognitively more advanced in the course of time
Input Theory
The studies of Motherese in the 1970’s focused upon the maternal input
Input Theory: Main Argument
Parents do not talk to their children in the same way as they talk to other adults and seem to be capable of adapting their language to give the child maximum opportunity to interact and learn
Input Theory: Main Figure
C. A. Ferguson (1977)
