Theories of Language Acquisition

Behaviourist Theory

In 1957 a piece of literature appeared that would come to affect how we view
language, human behaviour and language learning. B.F Skinner's Verbal
Behaviour (1957) applied a functional analysis approach to analyze language
behaviour in terms of their natural occurrence in response to environmental
circumstances and the effects they have on human interactions. Skinner's behaviour
learning approach relies on the components of classical, which involves
unconditioned and conditioned stimuli, and operant conditioning but particularly
the elements of operational conditioning. Operational conditioning refers to a
method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behaviour.
Behaviour operates on the environment to bring about favorable consequences or
avoid adverse ones. These same ideas of operant conditioning can also be applied
to language acquisition because Skinner believed that language could be treated
like any other kind of cognitive behaviour. According to the behaviourist theory,
language learning is a process of habit formation that involves a period of trial and
error where the child tries and fails to use correct language until it succeeds.
Infants also have human role models in their environment that provide the stimuli
and rewards required for operant conditioning. For example, if a child starts
babblings, which resembles appropriate words, then his or her babbling will be
rewarded by a parent or loved one by positive reinforcement such as a smile or
clap. Since the babblings were rewarded, this reward reinforces further
articulations of the same sort into groupings of syllables and words in a similar
situation (Demirezen, 1988).Children also utter words because they cause adults to
give them the things they want and they will only be given what they want once
the adult has trained or shaped the child through reinforcement and rewards speech
close to that of adult speech. Before long children will take on the imitation or
modeling component of Skinner's theory of language acquisition in which children
learn to speak by copying the utterances heard around them and by having their
responses strengthened by the repetitions, corrections and other reactions that
adults provide. However, before a child can begin to speak, they first start by
listening to the sounds in their environment for the first years of their life.
Gradually, the child learns to associate certain sounds with certain situations such
as the sound of endearment a mother produces when feeding her child. These
sounds then become pleasurable for the child on their own without being
accompanied by food and eventually the child will attempt to imitate these sounds
to invite the attention of his mother or another adult. If these sounds resemble that
of adult language the mother will respond with reward and the operant
conditioning process begins.

Innateness Theory

Noam Chomsky's innateness theory (or nativist theory) proposes that children have
an inborn or innate faculty for language acquisition that is biologically determined.
According to Goodluck (1991), nativists view language as a fundamental part of
the human genome, as a trait that makes humans human, and its acquisition is a
natural part of maturation. It seems that the human species has evolved a brain
whose neural circuits contain linguistic information at birth and this natural
predisposition to learn language is triggered by hearing speech. The child's brain is
then able to interpret what she or he hears according to the underlying principles or
structures it already contains (Linden, 2007).[ Chomsky has determined that being
biologically prepared to acquire language regardless of setting is due to the child's
language acquisition device (LAD), which is used as a mechanism for working out
the rules of language. Chomsky believed that all human languages share common
principles, such as all languages have verbs and nouns, and it was the child's task
to establish how the specific language she or he hears expresses these underlying
principles. For example, the LAD already contains the concept of verb tense and so
by listening to word forms such as "worked" or "played,” the child will then form a
hypothesis that the past tense of verbs are formed by adding the sound /d/,/t/ or /id/
to the base form. Yang (2006) also believes that children also initially possess, then
subsequently develop, an innate understanding or hypothesis about grammar
regardless of where they are raised. According to Chomsky, infants acquire
grammar because it is a universal property of language, an inborn development,
and has coined these fundamental grammatical ideas that all humans have as
universal grammar (UG). Children under the age of three usually don't speak in
full sentences and instead say things like "want cookie" but yet you would still not
hear them say things like "want my" or "I cookie" because statements like this
would break the syntactic structure of the phrase, a component of universal
grammar. Another argument of the nativist or innate theory is that there is a critical
period for language acquisition, which is a time frame during which environmental
exposure is needed to stimulate an innate trait. Linguist Eric Lenneberg in 1964
postulated that the critical period of language acquisition ends around the age of 12
years. He believed that if no language was learned before then, it could never be
learned in a normal and functional sense. It was termed the critical period
hypothesis and since then there has been a few case examples of individuals being
subject to such circumstances such as the girl known as Genie who raised in an
abusive environment to age 13, which didn't allow her to develop language skills.