Maria Monica Ana A.
Mendoza
BSEd- ENG 1
Language is extremely complex, yet children already know most of the grammar of their
native language before they are five years old Children acquire language without being
taught the rules of grammar by their parents (Adam Szczegielniak, pg. 2). By the
acquisition of language is meant the process whereby children achieve a fluent control
of their native language. Several theories have emerged to study the process of
language learning-acquisition.
THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Over the last fifty years, several theories have been put forward to explain the process by which
children learn to understand and speak a language. They can be summarized as follows:
Theory Central Idea Individual with
theory
Behaviorist Children imitate adults. Their correct utterances are Skinner
reinforced
when they get what they want or are praised.
Innateness A child's brain contains special language-learning Chomsky
mechanisms at
birth.
Cognitive Language is just one aspect of a child's overall intellectual Piaget
development.
Interaction This theory emphasizes the interaction between children Bruner
and them
care-givers.
It is important to recognize that they should not be seen simply as conflicting theories, replacing
each other in a sequence. Each theory has added to our overall understanding, placing emphasis
on different aspects of the process.
Behaviorism
The behaviorist psychologists developed their theories while carrying out a series of experiments
on animals. They observed that rats or birds, for example, could be taught to perform various
tasks by encouraging habit-forming. Researchers rewarded desirable behavior. This was known
as positive reinforcement. Undesirable behavior was punished or simply not rewarded - negative
reinforcement.
The behaviorist B. F. Skinner then proposed this theory as an explanation for language
acquisition in humans. In Verbal Behavior (1957), he stated:
"The basic processes and relations which give verbal behavior its special characteristics are
now fairly well understood. Much of the experimental work responsible for this advance has
been carried out on other species, but the results have proved to be surprisingly free of species
restrictions. Recent work has shown that the methods can be extended to human behavior
without serious modifications."
(cited in Lowe and Graham, 1998, p68)
Skinner suggested that a child imitates the language of its parents or carriers. Successful attempts
are rewarded because an adult who recognizes a word spoken by a child will praise the child
and/or give it what it is asking for. Successful utterances are therefore reinforced while
unsuccessful ones are forgotten.
Innateness
Language is not an autonomous system for communication. It is embedded in and supplemented
by gesture, gaze, stance, facial expression, voice quality in use for communicating. The main
argument in this theory is that children are born with an innate knowledge which guides them in
the language acquisition task. The child's natural predisposition to learn language is triggered by
hearing speech and the child's brain is able to interpret what s/he hears according to the
underlying principles or structures it already contains. This natural faculty has become known as
the Language Acquisition Device (LAD).
Cognitive
This is a learning theory which is based on cognitive psychology and encompasses the manner in
which people think and ultimately acquire knowledge and skills. This theory was developed by
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and focus on exploring the links between the stages
of cognitive development and language skills-- “sensory motor” intelligence. Cognitive thinking
is therefore concerned with the mental changes in a person's mind and these changes are as a
result of the cognitive processes. The processes involved in learning are outlined by Wilburg
(2010) namely: observing, categorizing, forming generalizations, decision making and problem
solving which allows the learners to make sense of the information provided. During the first
year of life, children seem unaware of the existence of objects they cannot see. An object which
moves out of sight ceases to exist. By the time they reach the age of 18 months, children have
realized that objects have an existence independently of their perception. The cognitive theory
draws attention to the large increase in children's vocabulary at around this age, suggesting a link
between object permanence and the learning of labels for objects.
Interaction
Theories of environmental influences on language-learning have tended to be built upon the
study of the- mother-infant. Bruner suggest that the language behavior of adults when talking to
children (known by several names by most easily referred to as child-directed speech or CDS) is
specially adapted to support the acquisition process. This support is often described to as
scaffolding for the child's language learning. Colwyn Trevarthen studied the interaction between
parents and babies who were too young to speak. He concluded that the turn-taking structure of
conversation is developed through games and non-verbal communication long before actual
words are uttered. In other words, children do not just learn from hearing utterances in a
language (without any meaning attached to them), but bring both knowledge and skills to the
language learning situation.
LINKS of RESOURCES:
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ycharles/klnl.pdf
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/adam/files/language_acquisition.ppt.pdf
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/c/1286/files/2019/10/2019_theories-of-
language-acquistion.pdf
http://serious-science.org/two-theories-of-language-acquisition-9237
