The Key Theories

1. The Key Theories Language Acquisition Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

2. Behaviourism • Proposed by B. F. Skinner (1957). • Suggests that children learn language through a process of positive and negative reinforcement. • A child is encouraged to imitate the language and behaviour of its parents/caregivers and receives Positive Reinforcement in the form of gratification of needs. Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

3. Arguments for… • Evidence of acquisition of non-essential elements, such as politeness features, is often as a result of positive and negative reinforcement. • Children usually acquire the pronunciations of their parents – imitation clearly plays a large part in the acquisition of Phonology Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

4. Arguments against… • Parents/caregivers often respond positively to utterances that are grammatically non-standard as long as they are truthful e.g. Me kick ball/ Wow! Did you? Good boy/girl. • There is evidence to suggest that constantly correcting speech actually hinders development. • This theory cannot explain Overgeneralisation or Overextension. (holded, runned etc.) • Behaviourism cannot explain how children acquire such a huge amount of language in such a short space of time. Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

5. Applying to data • Skinner • His theory in a nutshell • Children learn to speak by imitating their parents and being rewarded or punished according to the accuracy of their utterances. • Research that supports this idea • Children eventually learn to say ‘went’ instead of ‘goed’. This seems to be learned through listening, imitation and correction. • What to look out for in the data • adults explicitly modelling or teaching language and children responding • children imitating/repeating adults’ speech • children learning or repairing mistakes after correction from adults Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

6. Innateness or Nativist Theory • Proposed by Noam Chomsky. • Babies are born with an innate knowledge of the structure of language (all language share the same basic structure) and this speeds up their learning of their native language when they hear it. When they hear examples of language they fit these into their (unconscious) mental model of how language works (called the Language Acquisition Device or LAD by McNeill). Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

7. Arguments for… • Children everywhere seem to learn language at the same pace, moving through similar stages of development at similar ages irrespective of their culture and mother tongue. • There is a critical period in language learning development between the ages of 2 and 7. • Children consistently create forms of language that they have never heard. Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

8. Support for Chomsky • Berko-Gleason (1958) found that children were able to provide the plural of ‘wug’, the name of an imaginary creature, even though they had never heard the word before • Children learn language at about the same age, acquiring particular elements in roughly the same order • Similar grammatical categories (noun, verb, etc) exist in all languages Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

9. Arguments against… • Somewhat oversimplifies a very complex process. • Difficult to ‘prove.’ • Clear evidence that reinforcement from other speakers is vital in a child’s development. Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

10. Chomsky continued… • What to look out for in the data: • children doing more than simply imitating adult speech, e.g. semantic overextension & overgeneralisation suggest children are actively constructing language according to an unconscious model of how language works (LAD) • children resisting or simply not responding to correction from adults • children making up new names for things • children forming utterances they’ve never heard anyone else say (can’t just be imitating but must be actively constructing sentences using their implicit knowledge of the ‘rules’ (LAD)) Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

11. Cognitive • Proposed by Piaget. • Piaget proposed that a child’s performance and competence could differ hugely. • Suggested that children would not be able to use language accurately or effectively for concepts they did not fully understand e.g. narrow vs. thin. Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

12. Piaget • Piaget broke children’s speech down into two areas: Social Function (as with Halliday’s Taxonomy) is all about communicating with and influencing the world in which we live in. • Egocentric speech is all about children using language to help make sense of the world they are experiencing, and to order and classify their environment. They often use this function when playing alone or when nobody else is near. Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

13. Vygotsky • Vygostky saw Ego-centric speech as merely external thought processes. Once children realised adults didn’t ‘think’ out loud, they stopped ‘thinking’ out loud. • Zone of Proximal Development: in order to learn, children had to be challenged and supported in their acquisition of new language, structures and devices. Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

14. Social Interactionism • Proposed by Bruner. • Basically states that children learn language by using language in social situations e.g. conversations with parents. The more a child interacts, the more swiftly and securely they acquire language. • Supported by Clarke-Stewart (1973) who found that children whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies. Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

15. LASS • The Language Acquisition Support System • Gaining the child’s attention • Query – asking a question • Label – telling the baby what the object is • Feedback • It was also found that children who grow up in the absence of social interaction, fail to develop language in the normal way e.g. James, his deaf parents and the tv. Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology

16. Critical Age Theory and The Feral Children • Lennenberg proposed that the brain was only able to acquire language effectively between birth and 12 years of age, a time known as the Critical Period. • There have been many cases of children who have been denied the opportunity to acquire language in this period and then are unable to develop language in a fully competent way e.g. Genie. Lesson Focus: Theory and Terminology