Theories of First Language Acquisition

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Theories of First Language Acquisition

Abdureim I. Abdurashytov

ELT-517

29 May 2013

Nicosia

Introduction

A great many theories regarding language development in human beings have been proposed in the past and still being proposed in the present time. Such theories have generally arisen out of major disciplines such as psychology and linguistics. Language acquisition theories have basically centered around “nurture” and “nature” distinction or on “empiricism” and “nativism”. The doctrine of empiricism holds that all knowledge comes from experience, ultimately from our interaction with the environment through our reasoning or senses. Empiricism, in this sense, can be contrasted to nativism, which holds that at least some knowledge is not acquired through interaction with the environment, but is genetically transmitted and innate. To put it another way, some theoreticians have based their theories on environmental factors while others believed that it is the innate factors that determine the acquisition of language.

In this paper, I will shed light on behaviorist, innatist, interactional/developmental, and connectionist perspectives. We will explore these approaches, examining their overall theories, limitations, and contributions. First, let's look at behaviorist perspective.

The behaviorist perspective: Say what I say.

Skinner, who was a Behaviorist, argued that language acquisition is like any kind of cognitive behavior – it is learnt by reinforcement and shaping. He also calls this operant conditioning – where the child goes through trial-and-error, in other words, where the child tries and fails to use correct language until it succeeds; with reinforcement and shaping provided by the parents gestures (smiles, attention and approval) which are pleasant to the child. Parents, whom ignore unfamiliar sounds and show increased attention to the reinforced phonemes, extinguish the acquisition of phonemes and morphemes. The morphemes then become refined into words by shaping. Parents’ accuracy will lead to total extinguishment of “baby” pronunciation and finally, by selective reinforcement and behavior shaping, words will be shaped into telegraphic two-word sentences, later into sentences until the full language has been acquired. Skinner differentiated between two types of verbal responses that a child makes. One of them, the mand is verbal behavior that is reinforced by the child receiving something it wants. For example, when the child sees a chocolate, it can show its own demand by calling out “choc”. As the child used appropriate verbal behavior, he then receives chocolate and reinforcement. The other one is tact, which is verbal behavior caused by imitating others. For instance, when a parent points at an object and says “ball”, the child imitates this word and the parent will then approve, which is just another form of reinforcement.

The innatist perspective: It's all in your mind

Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential figures in linguistics, and his ideas about how language is acquired and how it is stored in the mind sparked a revolution in many aspects of linguistics and psychology, including the study of language acquisition. A central part of his thinking is that all human languages are fundamentally innate and that the same universal principles

underlie all of them. He argued that children are biologically programmed for language and that language develops in the child in just the same way that other biological functions develop. For example, every child will learn to walk as long as adequate nourishment and reasonable freedom of movement are provided. The child does not have to be taught. Most children learn to walk at about the same age, and walking is essentially the same in all normal human beings. This ability is supported by, what Chomsky calls a LAD (innate language acquisition device) an inbuilt mechanism that automatically allows a child to decode any spoken language it hears around it. Chomsky suggests that all languages share a similar deep structure despite the differences in their surface structure. For instance, “I did the homework” and “The homework was done by me” have the same deep structure but differ in the surface structure. The LAD supplies humans with the transformational grammar, which simply means the process of translating underlying meaning into speech. Children use these rules but will sometimes make errors, such as goed and comed (went and came). These are errors in performance not in competence, Chomsky claims. For Chomsky, language acquisition is very similar. The environment makes only a basic contribution-in this case, the availability of people who speak to the child. The child, or rather, the child's biological endowment, will do the rest. Chomsky argued that the behaviourist theory failed to account for 'the

logical problem of language acquisition- the fact that children come to know more about the structure of their language than they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language they hear. The language children are exposed to includes false starts, incomplete sentences, and slips of the tongue, and yet they learn to distinguish between gram-matical and ungrammatical sentences. He concluded that children's minds are not blank slates to be filled by imitating language they hear in the environment. Instead, he hypothesized, children are born with a specific innate ability to discover for themselves the ubderlying rules of a language system on the basis of the samples of a natural language they are exposed to. This innate endowment was seen as a sort of template, containing the principles that are universal to all human languages. This Universal Grammar (UG) would prevent the child from pursuing all sorts of wrong hypotheses about how language systems might work. If children are pre-equipped with UG, then what they have to learn is the ways in which the language they are acquiring makes use of these principles.

The innatist perspective emphasizes the fact that all children successfully acquire their native language (or languages if they live in a multilingual community). Children who are profoundly deaf will learn sign language if they are exposed to it in infancy, and their progress in the acquisition of that language system is similar to hearing children's acquisition of spoken language. Even children with very limited cognitive ability develop quite complex language systems if they are brought up in environments in which people interact with them. Children master the basic syntax and morphology of the language spoken to them in a variety of conditions-some which would be expected to enhance language development (for example, caring, attentive parents who focus on the child's language), and some which might be expected to inhibit it (for example, abusive or rejecting parents). Children achieve different levels of vocabulary, creativity, social grace, and so on, but virtually all achieve mastery of the structure of the language or languages spoken to them.

Chomsky's ideas are often linked to the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH)- the hypothesis that animals, including humans, are gebetically programmed to acquire certain kinds of knowledge and skill at specific times in life. Beyond those "critical periods", it is either difficult or impossible to acquire those abilities.With regard to language, the CPH suggests that children who are not given access to language in infancy and early childhood (because of deafness or extreme isolation) will never acquire language if these deprivations go on for too long.

It is difficult to find evidence for or against the CPH, since nearly all children are exposed to language at an early age. However, history has documented a few 'natural experiments' where children have been deprived of contact with language. Two of the most famous cases are those of Victor and Genie.

Interactionist/developmental perspectives: Learning from inside and out.

Cognitive and developmental psychologists argue that the innatists place too much emphasis on the 'final state' (the COMPETENCE of adult NATIVE SPEAKERS) and not enough on the developmental aspects of language acquisition. In their view, language acquisition is but one example of the human child's remarkable ability to learn from experience, and they see no

need to assume that there are specific brain structures devoted to language acquisition. They hypothesize that what children need to know is essentially available in the language they are exposed to as they hear it used in thousands of hours of interactions with the people and objects around them.

Developmental psychologists and psycholinguists have focused on the interplay berween the innate learning ability of children and the environment in which they develop. These researchers attribute considerably more importance to the environment than the innatists do even though they also recognize a powerful learning mechanism in the human brain. They see language acquisition as similar to and influenced by the acquisition of other kinds of skill and knowledge, rather than as something that is different from and largely independent of the child's experience and cognitive development.

Piaget's Cognitive Theory.

One of the earliest proponents of the view that children's language is built on their cognitive development was the Swiss psychologist/epistemologist, Jean Piaget (1951/1946). In the early decades of the twentieth century, Piaget observed infants and children in their play and in their interaction with objects and people. He was able to trace the development of their cognitive understanding of such things as object permanence ( knowing that things hidden from sight are still there), the stability of quantities regardless of changes in their appearance ( knowing that ten pennies spread out to form a long line are not more numerous than ten pennies in a tightly squeezed line), and logical inferencing ( figure out which properties of a set of rods- size, weight, material, ect. - cause some rods to sink and others to float on water ). It is easy to see from this how children's cognitive development would partly determine how they use language. For example, the use of certain terms such as "bigger" or "more" depend on the children's understanding of the concepts they represent. The developing cognitive understanding is built on the interaction between the child and the things that can ve observed or manipulated. For Piaget, language was one of a number of symbol systems that are developed in childhood. Language can be used to represent knowledge that children have acquired through physical interaction with the environment.

Another recent view of language acquisition comes from "Connectionism". Connectionists differ sharply from the Chomskyan innatists because they hypothesize that language acquisition does not require a separate "module of the mind" but can be explained in terms of learning in general. Futhermore, they argue that what children need to know is essentially available to them in the language they are exposed to. Some of the research has involved computer simulations in which language samples are provided as input to a fairly simple program. The goal is to show that the computer program can 'learn' certain things if it is exposed to them enough. The program can even generalize beyond what it has actually been exposed to and make the same kinds of creative 'mistakes' that children make, such as putting a regular -ed ending on an irregular verb, for example, eated.

Jeffrey Elman (1996) explain language acquisition in terms of how children acquire links or 'connections' between words and phrases and the situations in which they occur. He claim that when children hear a word or phrase in the context of a specific object, event, or person, an association is created in the child's mind between the word or phrase and what it represents. Thus, hearing a word brings to mind the object, and seeing the object brings to mind the word or phrase. Eventually any of the characteristics of the object or event may trigger the retrieval of the associated word or phrase from memory. For xample, a child may first recignize the word "cat" only in reference to the family pet and only when the cat is miaowing beside the kitchen door.

As a conclusion I would like to mention that there is a variety of resons that people should study language development. First, interest in language development represents part of a larger concern for human development. A second reason, it would be helpful for future educators and parents to facilitate child behavior change. Futhermore, it will give us a great insight into normal and other-than-normal processes. A third reason for studying language development is that it is interesting and can help us understand our own behavior.

Reference

Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lightbown, P. M., & N. Spada. (2006). How languages are learned (3rd ed.). China: Oxford University Press.

Robert, E. & Owens, Jr. (2011). Language development: an introduction (8^th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson