Week 9b - Theoretical approaches Flashcards
Define behaviourism
- Conditioning of behaviour through positive and negative reinforcement
- B F Skinner
Operant conditioning
- The repetition of an initially spontaneous response
- Behaviour increased in probability by positive reinforcement
- Behaviour decreased in probability by negative reinforcement
What does behaviourism state children do?
- Begin to speak through imitation
- Their linguistic behaviour is reinforced and punished by the audience
What is verbal and non verbal praise?
- Verbal: praise, agreement and matching
- Non-verbal: audience acting upon a request
Novel responses
- B F Skinner 1976
- Produced by varying old responses
- eg. ‘red’ and ‘car’ to make ‘red car’
- May explain children’s early morphological/ syntax errors
Define nativism
- The theory that language is innate
- Chomsky
What is generative grammar?
- Innate
- Grammar in terms of logical rules that can be used to generate infinite sentences
Poverty of the stimulus argument
- Stimulus is impoverished
- Children can’t possibly hear everything in the input and acquire it
- They can produce more than what they have heard
- eg. Jean Berko Wug test, haven’t heard wugs
Critical period
Name
Date
Hypothesis
- Lenneberg
- 1967
- Critical period for language acquisition which ends when the maturation of the brain is complete
- After the period language can’t be normally acquired
Nativism study
Name
Date
Method
Result
- Lenneberg 1967
- Effects of brain lesions in children
- Younger the child the less effects on language
- Over 14 there had long lasting effects
Define usage based approach
- Assumes that language development is linked to other cognitive skills
- Focus on how language structure develops in mind on basis of input and interaction
- Input is crucial
- Socio-cultural
What are the four aspects of usage based theory?
- Intention reading
- Schematisation and analogy
- Entrenchment
- Distributional analysis
Schematisation and analogy
- Children develop schemas
- Set of ideas linked to certain objects or things
- Facilitates their language production
Entrenchment
Formation of habits
Distributional analysis
- Parts of language grouped due to use
- Patterns identified by children and used to create linguistic units
- eg. SVO, children learn where objects go and interchange them in utterances
Usage based approach theory
Name
Date
Statement
- Tomasello
- 2003
- Grammar consists of constructions made of components
Collaboration
- Usage based and nativism
How do you calculate the MLUm?
What does it stand for?
Morphemes divided by utterances = MLUm
Mean length of utterance in morphemes
MLUw
Mean length of utterance in words
Evidence of critical period
- After 10 months, infants can’t detect phonemic contrasts not in their ambient language (eg. Thompson native American Werker and Tees 1984)
- Jeanie feral child; couldn’t talk because she didn’t learn before 7yrs
Issues with the critical period
- Infants develop at different rates
- Cut off is different for all children
- Infants can acquire second language after end of Universal Listening
