1. Theories of language acquisition
Lecture II

2. Theoretical Approaches to L1 Acquisition
Behaviourism: Say what I say
Innatism: It’s all in your mind
Interactionist/Developmental perspectives: Learning from interaction

3. Behaviourism: Say what I say
Influential in 1940s and 1950s, esp. in the US
B. F. Skinner – the best known proponent of Behaviourism
Skinner: Language behaviour is the production of correct responses to stimuli through reinforcement.
Language learning is the result of 1) imitation (word-for-word repetition), 2) practice (repetitive manipulation of form), 3) feedback on success (positive reinforcement), and 4) habit formation.
The quality and quantity of the language that the child hears, as well as the consistency of the reinforcement offered by others in the environment, would shape the child’s language behaviour.

4. Behaviourism: Say what I say
Children’s imitations are not random:
Their imitation is selective and based on what they are currently learning. They choose to imitate something they have already begun to understand, rather than simply imitating what is available in the environment.
Mother: Let’s call daddy
Jim: Call daddy
Children imitate around 10% of everything they hear.
Children’s practice of new language forms
The way they practice new forms is very similar to the way foreign language students do substitution drills.
Their practice of language forms is also selective and reflects what they would like to learn. They are often in charge of the conversation with adults.

5. Behaviourism: Say what I say
Patterns in language
Mother: Maybe we need to take you to the doctor.
Randall (36 months): Why? So he can doc my little bump?” (showing the understanding of word formation)
Son: I putted the plates on the table!
Mother: You mean, I put the plates on the table.
Son: No, I putted them on all by myself.
(showing the understanding of using ‘ed’ to make the past tense for a verb” and the focus on the meaning, not form)
Focus on meaning
Father: I’d like to propose a toast.
Child: I’d like to propose a piece of bread.
Mother: I love you to pieces.
Child: I love you three pieces.

6. Behaviorism: Say what I say
Question formation
Putting ‘are’ at the beginning of the sentence
Are dogs can wiggle their tails?
Are those are my boots?
Are this is hot?
Order of events
You took all the towels away because I can’t dry my hands.
Imitation and practice alone cannot explain some of the forms created by children. Children appear to pick out patterns and then generalize or overgeneralize them to new contexts.
They create new forms or new uses of words, which are usually comprehensible and often correct.

7. Behaviorism: Say what I say
Behaviourism offers a reasonable way of understanding how children learn aspects of language in the early stages.
Classical behaviourism does not offer a satisfactory explanation of how complex grammatical aspects are acquired.
Such limitations led researchers to look for different explanations for language acquisition

8. Innatism: It’s all in your mind
Chomsky’s viewpoints:
Children are biologically programmed for language and language develops in the child in just the same way that other biological functions develop.
Ex. Children learn to walk themselves, don’t need to be taught.
The environment makes only a basic contribution, that is, the availability of people who speak to the child. Therefore, the child’s biological endowment (LAD) will do the rest.
Children are born with a specific innate ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language system on the basis of the samples of a natural language they are exposed to.

9. Innatism: It’s all in your mind
Chomsky argues that behaviourism cannot provide sufficient explanations for children’s language acquisition for the following reasons:
Children come to know more about the structure of their language than they could 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 grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
Children are by no means systematically corrected or instructed on language by parents.

10. Innatism: It’s all in your mind
LAD (an imaginary “black box” existing somewhere in the brain):
LAD contains the principles which are universal to all human languages (i.e.. Universal Grammar – UG).
For the LAD to work, children need access only to samples of a natural language, which serve as a trigger to activate the device.
Once the LAD is activated, children are able to discover the structure of the language to be learned by matching the innate knowledge of basic grammatical principles (UG) to the structures of the particular language in the environment.

11. Innatism: It’s all in your mind
The biological basis for the innatist position:
The Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) –
Humans and animals are genetically programmed to acquire certain kinds of knowledge and skills at specific times in life.
Beyond those critical periods, it is impossible or difficult to acquire those abilities.
Children who are not exposed to language in infancy and early childhood, will never acquire language fluently.
It is difficult to find evidence for or against the CPH as all children are exposed to language at an early stage.

12. Innatism: It’s all in your mind
Three case studies of abnormal language development - evidence of the CPH
Victor – a boy of about 12 years old (1799)
Genie – a girl of 13 years old (1970)
Deaf signers (native signers, early learners, vs. late learners)

13. Interactionist/developmental Perspectives: Learning from interaction
Problems of Innatism:
The innatists placed too much emphasis on the “final state” (i.e. the linguistic competence of adult native speakers), but not enough on the developmental aspects of language acquisition.
Language acquisition is an example of children’s ability to learn from experience. What children need to know is essentially available in the language they are exposed to.

14. Interactionist/developmental Perspectives: Learning from inside and out
This position views that language develops as a result of the interplay between the innate learning ability of children and the environment in which they develop.
Interactionists attribute more importance to the environment than the innatists do even though they also recognize a powerful learning mechanism in the human brain.

15. The Interactionist Position
Piaget: Language is dependent upon and springs from cognitive development. That is, children’s cognitive development determines their language development.
(e.g., the use of words as “bigger” or “more” depends on children’s understanding of the concepts they represent.)
He argued that the developing cognitive understanding is built on the interaction between the child and the things which can be observed, touched, and manipulated.
For him, language was one of a number of symbol systems developed in childhood, rather than a separate module of the mind. Language can be used to represent knowledge that children have acquired through physical interaction with the environment.

16. The Interactionist Position
Vygotsky: He argued that language develops primarily from social interaction.
Zone of proximal development (ZPD): a level that a child is able to do when there is support from interaction with a more advanced interlocutor. That is, a supportive interactive environment enables children to advance to a higher level of knowledge and performance than s/he would be able to do independently.
He observed the importance of conversations which children have with adults and with other children and saw in these conversations the origins of both language and thought.

17. The Interactionist Position
How Piaget’s view differs from Vygotsky’s:
Piaget hypothesized that language developed as a symbol system to express knowledge acquired through interaction with the physical world.
Vygotsky hypothesized that thought was essentially internalized speech, and speech emerged in social interaction.

18. The Interactionist Position
Child-directed Speech (modified language interaction):
Phonological modification: a slower rate of delivery, higher pitch, more varied intonation
Syntactical modification: shorter, simpler sentence patterns, frequent repetition, and paraphrase.
Limited conversation topics: e.g., the ‘here and now’ and topics related to the child’s experiences.
More important than modification is the conversational give-and-take.

19. The Interactionist Position
The interaction between a language-learning child and an interlocutor who responds in some way to the child is important.
Exposure to impersonal sources of language such as television or radio alone are not sufficient for children to learn the structure of a particular language.
One-on-one interaction gives children access to language that is adjusted to their level of comprehension.
Once children have acquired some language, however, television can be a source of language and cultural information.

20. Connectionism
Though both innatism and connectionism look at the cognitive aspect of language acquisition, yet they differ in the following:
Connectionists hypothesize that language acquisition dose not require a separate “module of the mind” but can be explained in terms of learning in general.
Connectionists argue that what children need to know is essentially available in the language they are exposed to. They attribute greater importance to the role of the environment than to any innate knowledge in the learner.

21. Connectionism
Connectionism views language as a complex system of units which become interconnected in the mind as they are encountered together.
The more often units are heard or seen together, the more likely it is that the presence of one will lead to the activation of the other.
Language acquisition is not just a process of associating words with elements of external reality.
It is also a process of associating words and phrases with the other words and phrases that occur with them, or words with grammatical morphemes that occur with them.

22. Language disorders and delays
There are different types of disabilities such as: deafness, articulatory problems, autism, dyslexia and others, which affect the language development.
Parents and teachers to seek professional advice if they feel that a child is not developing language normally.
Some children may not speak before the age of three.
One way to determine whether the child is developing the language is to see whether he/she responds to language.

23. Childhood bilingualism
“Simultaneous bilinguals”
Children who learn more than one language from birth.
“Sequential bilinguals”
Children who begin to learn a second language after they have acquired the first language.

24. Childhood bilingualism
Is it difficult for children to cope with two languages?
There is little support for the myth that learning more than one language in early childhood slows down the child’s linguistic development or interferes with cognitive and academic development.
Bilingualism can have positive effects on abilities that are related to academic success, such as metalinguistic awareness.
The learning of languages for bilingual children is more related to the circumstances in which each language is learned than to any limitation in the human capacity to learn more than one language.

25. Childhood bilingualism
Language attrition for bilinguals -
“Subtractive bilingualism” (Lambert, 1987)
When children are “submerged” in a second language for long periods in early schooling, they may begin to lose their native language (L1) before they have developed an age-appropriate mastery of the L2.
It can have negative consequences for children’s self-esteem.
In some cases, children continue to be caught between two languages; not having mastered the L2, but not having continued to develop the L1.

26. Childhood bilingualism
Solution for “subtractive bilingualism”:
to strive for “additive bilingualism”
Parents should continue speaking the L1 to their children to maintain the home language, while the L2 is being learned at school.
Maintaining the family language also creates opportunities for the children to continue both cognitive and affective development in a language they understand easily while they are still learning the L2.

27. Summary
Each of the three theoretical approaches explains a different aspect of first language acquisition.
Behaviorists (learning through imitation, practice, reinforcement, habit-formation) – the acquisition of vocabulary and grammatical morphemes.
Innatists (LAD/UG/CPH) – the acquisition of complex grammar (structure of the language).
Interactionists (social interaction) – the acquisition of how form and meaning are related, how communicative functions are carried out, and how language is used appropriately.

28. Questions??? .

29. Questions
The more the parents talk to the children, the more their vocabulary will grow?

30. Tasks
Examine the language imitation of 2-3 year old children.