Behaviourism was a theory of learning that was very influential in the 1940’s and 1950’s, especially in the USA. The best known proponent of this theory was B.F. Skinner.
The Behaviourist Perspective
Traditional behaviourists believed that when children imitated the language produced by those around them, their attempts to reproduce what they had just heard received positive reinforcement. Thus children would develop
Analysing children’s speech: Definitions and Examples
Explaining First Language AcquisitionThe 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 language and psychology, including the study of language acquisition.
The Innatist Perspective
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.
Chomsky argued that the behaviourist’s 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 then they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples they hear.
The Innatist Perspective
Instead he argued that 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 that 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 pursing all sorts of wrong conclusions about how language systems might work.
The Innatist Perspective
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 normal children’s acquisition of spoken language.
The Critical Period Hypothesis
Chomsky’s ideas are often linked to the CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS (CPH) – that animals, including humans, are genetically programmed to acquire certain kinds of knowledge and skill at specific times in life.
CPH suggest that children who are not given access to language in infancy and early childhood will never acquire language if these deprivations continue.
The Critical Period Hypothesis
It is difficult to find evidence for or against the CPH, since nearly all children are exposed to language at an early age.
Two famous cases, that of Victor and Genie tend to support the CPH. Also research done on sign language acquisition has found that there is a critical period for first language acquisition.
Interactionist Perspectives: Learning From Inside and Out
In this view, language acquisition is but one example of the 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.
The focus is on the interplay between the innate learning ability of the child and the environment in which they develop.
Interactionist Perspectives
Lev Vygotsky (1978) argued that in a supportive interactive environment, children are able to advance to a higher level of knowledge and performance.
Researchers working in a ‘language socialization’ framework have studied language acquisition in children from a variety of cultural groups. They have found that the kind of child-directed speech observed in middle-class American homes is by no means universal. In some societies, adults do not engage in conversation or verbal play with very young children.
The Effects of Socioeconomic Status, Race, and Parenting on Language Development in Early Childhood
Language Disorders and Delays
Some children cannot progress through the stages of language learning without difficulty or delay. Disabilities may include deafness or dyslexia.
While most children produce recognizable words by twelve months some may not speak before the age of three years.
In very young children one way to determine whether delayed language reflects a problem or simply an individual difference within the normal range is to determine whether the child responds to language and appears to understand even if he or she is not speaking.
Language Disorders & Delays
For older children, delays in learning to read that seem out of keeping with a child’s overall intellectual functioning may suggest that there is a specific problem
As Jim Cummins (1984, 2000) and others have pointed out, on particular group of children who have often been misdiagnosed as having language delays or disorders are children who arrive at their first day of school without an age appropriate knowledge of the