Lecture 2

Fundamental Language Abilities. Types of Theories

Explaining First Language Acquisition.

2.1. INTRODUCTION
The current section presents an overview of the fundamental language abilities
of speakers and provides an account of the theoretical frameworks that explain first
language acquisition, namely: the behaviourist theories of Watson, Staats, Skinner and
Fries, the mentalist theory of Chomsky (the theory of the innate language mechanism)
and the implication of Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories for child language acquisition.

2.2. FUNDAMENTAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES

The fundamental language abilities of speakers are production and
understanding of utterances. The explanation of how people are able to carry out these
two common everyday activities has been the object of study of psychologists,
linguists, neurophysiologists, pathologists and philosophers. Two main types of
theories have emerged:
 the behaviourist theory which claims that language acquisition is a matter
of habit formation; and
 the mentalist theory which claims that language is a rule governed
system which can be acquired due to the fact that human mind is
equipped with a faculty for learning languages, referred to as a language
learning device, and as a result of the application of abstract rules for
sentence production and understanding.
Those two theories will be considered in details in the subsequent parts of this
section but before that attention should be given to a general discussion of the basic
language abilities of speakers.
To begin with, we will try to provide an illustration of the two fundamental
language abilities by using a sentence given by Steinberg (1982):
A foreign princess who claimed that she had become pregnant as the
result of eating reindeer meat sukiyaki which had been served by a steward
during her flight from Helsinki to Tokyo filed a paternity suit against the airline.
[Steinberg, 1982:1-2]
According to Steinberg one could give a positive answer to the following
questions related to the sentence above:
1. Did you understand what was said?
2. Could you produce a sentence that no one including yourself had ever experienced
before but which you and others could understand?
3. Is the sentence a well-formed English sentence? *

*
Sentences like: Went bought the present; The dress which the girl was expensive, and She expired
with her daughter.

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4. If the word foreign were deleted, would the remaining string be well-formed?
5. The sentence is about 40 words long. Could you make it longer and still keep it
well-formed?
This sentence and the questions prove that speakers can produce and
understand sentences which they have never experienced before – i.e. sentences with
unique content (novelty) and length and which are well-formed (grammatically correct).
In fact people can produce long sentences – when there is no limit to the length of the
utterances. That illustrates another speaker’s ability – to produce and understand an
unlimited number of sentences. It has to be noted that in a language the number of
words is more or less limited which suggests that there will be a fixed finite number of
possible sentences. But although the number of possible sentences is limited, it is the
ability of speakers to produce and understand that is without limit.

2.3. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND OF SPEAKER’S BASIC LANGUAGE

ABILITIES
In this section will be discussed three main types of theories: Nobody’s Whole
Sentence Theory, the Behavourist theories and the Mentalist theories that account for
the language abilities of speakers.
2.3.1. Nobody’s Whole Sentence Theory
This theory is called Nobody’s Whole Sentence Theory because no one has
ever proposed it.
According to this theory people learn a language by acquiring whole sentences.
“They do this by memorizing every string of words (an utterance) that they hear along
with the
environmental context of the utterance so that it may have meaning” [Steinberg,
1982:3). In this way people store in their memory a number of sentences and their
meanings. However, this theory does not provide an adequate explanation of the basic
abilities of language speakers. The following drawbacks can be found:
1. If we assume that speakers store in their mind a limitless number of
sentences and their meanings, then we as speakers will not be able to
produce novel sentences. We will just be able to reproduce only the
sentences which we have stored in our memory. Moreover, as listeners
we will not be able to understand those novel sentences that have not
been stored in our minds.
What happens in reality is that as speakers we are able to produce novel
sentences and as listeners we are able to understand novel sentences even when
the things mentioned are not in our immediate environment – e.g. The bank is closed
on Saturday and Sunday.
2. A significant feature of human speech production is the fact that we can
formulate grammatically correct sentences. As speakers and listeners
we can also differentiate grammatically correct from grammatical
incorrect sentences. If people were only able to store and reproduce
whole sentences, then they wouldn’t be able to tell whether a given
sentence is grammatically correct or not. For example:

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Ungrammatical utterances Grammatically correct utterances

* Peter goes to everyday by car to school. Peter goes to school by car every day.

* Can you make a short sentences? Can you make short sentences?

* The house the cat in is. The house in which the cat is in.

3. A speaker who knows only the sentences which (s)he has previously
experienced, would not be able to produce or understand a sentence
longer than the ones (s)he has memorized. But in fact as speakers we
can make sentences in which the number of words is not fixed. If we
make long sentences, then they consist of clauses – the longer the
sentence is, the more clauses it has. For example:

Types of sentences Definition Example

Simple sentence Contains an independent I like biscuits and coffee.
(an independent clause comprising of a Mary goes to the library every
clause) subject and a predicate. day.
Compound sentence Contains two independent I played tennis, so my sister
clauses joined by a went shopping.
coordinator (and, or, so, for He tried to clean the house
etc.) and I tried to cook dinner.
Complex sentence Contains and independent The teacher returned the
clause joined by one or tests after she had checked
more dependent clauses. them.
When he called me this
morning, he forgot to tell me
about his new job.

The conclusion that we can make about the applicability of this theory is:
Nobody's Whole Sentence Theory fails to explain adequately the basic language
abilities of people.

2.3.2. Behaviourist theories

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 There are four main theories that attempt to explain the language abilities of
people, namely:
a) The Word Association theory proposed by John B. Watson (the founder
of Behaviourism);
b) The Word Class Association theory proposed by Staats; and
c) The Sentence Frame theories of Skinner and of Fries.

2.3.2.1. Watson’s Word Association Theory

This type of theory is named after the person who has proposed it – John
Broadus Watson (1878 – 1958) – an American psychologist who established the
psychological school of behaviourism.
John B. Watson claimed in his seminal work Behaviourism (1924)* that we
formulate new sentences “... by manipulating words, shifting them about until a new
pattern is hit upon. Since we are never in the same general situation when we begin
to think, the word patterns will always be different” [Watson, 1924: 247 in Steinberg,
1982: 4]. According to Watson the language knowledge that speakers acquire is the
following:
(1) Speakers learn a number of words but they also store in their minds the
sound forms of those words along with their meaning. The sound forms
of words and their meaning are related to objects and events in the real
world – e.g. the sound form of the word table /teɪbl/ is connected with
the word object in the environment;
(2) Speakers learn the interconnections between words in a sentence. For
example in the sentence The girl sang the speakers will learn the
connection among the three words and among the sentence
components: the-boy and boy-jumped.
The advantage of Watson’s Word Association theory is that it proves that as
speakers we can produce novel grammatically correct sentences. We can connect
words in a sentence on the basis of the learned interconnections between the words.
For example the above-mentioned sentence The girl sang can be made longer by
adding more words to it: The girl sang the song. But at the same time if we follow this
principle of sentence production, we could also be able to construct novel but
grammatically incorrect sentences like: The girl sang the song sang the girl. This is due
to the fact that the theory fails to explain when we should stop connecting words.
Based on this we can conclude that Watson’s theory cannot ensure that
speakers will be able to produce only grammatically correct sentences and therefore,
it does not provide an adequate explanation of human’s abilities to produce and
understand sentences.

2.3.2.2. Staats’s Word Class Association Theory

Arthur W. Staats (1924 – present) developed the ideas of John B. Watson and
extended his work. He suggested that a sentence is formed by the association of word

*
Watson, J. B. (1924) Behaviourism. New York: Norton.

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classes (nouns, verbs, etc.) with one another. For him it is word classes that are
connected, not individual words as it is for Watson. According to Staats speakers learn
the connections between words in a sentence together with the presupposed
knowledge of word classes. The prior knowledge that speakers have is the knowledge
that words belong to word classes, i.e. verbs (e.g. be, live, think, drive, speak), nouns
(e.g. mother, bird, snow, bread), determiners (e.g. a / an, the, some, my), adjectives
(e.g. blue, beautiful, surprising, tall), adverbs (e.g. happily, recently, slowly, fast),
prepositions (e.g. in, on, under, behind) and conjunctions (e.g. and, because, but, if).
So if we take for example the sentences The girl sang and The girl sang the
song, the speaker would remember the article-noun combinations (the-girl; the-song)
and the noun-verb combination (girl-sang). If prior learning has established that the
belongs to the class of determiners, girl and song belong to the class of nouns and
sang to the class of verbs, then substitutions within the world class may take place.
Based upon this novel sentences could be produced – e.g. The boy sang the song;
The woman sang the song; The man sang the song etc. as long as the words boy,
woman and man have been previously learned and stored as members of one and the
same class.
This theory is more complex than Watson’s theory but is has the following
shortcomings:
 It allows for the production of both grammatical and ungrammatical
sentences because there is no set of rules that define how grammar
functions. That is why grammatically incorrect sentences like * The girl sang
the song sang the girl sang could be generated. This suggests that as
speakers of a language we have other types of knowledge (apart from the
knowledge of word classes) that allow us to produce novel and
grammatically correct utterances.
 The idea that words in a language are organized into different word classes
is a true one, but still there is no agreement among linguists as to the criteria
that define the different classes. As a representative of the field of structural
linguistics in the USA, Staats uses the syntactic criteria for the division of
words into different classes. According to these criteria words which form
one and the same class have similar “privilege of occurrence”. For example
the class of nouns appears after articles and can take the position of
subjects or objects in the sentence. Although such a division of word classes
appears sound, it is not entirely adequate. This can be illustrated by the
example presented by Steinberg [1982: 7]:

A B C D E F G
(1) The horse likes sugar in the morning.
(2) The cow in the meadow slept soundly.
(3) The dog which bit little girls barked.
(4) The theory the professor formulated was mine.

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(5) The city horse chased the friendly dog.
If we apply the “principle of occurrence” used by Staats, then we can
successfully define the word classes in column A (definite articles) and B (nouns). But
this cannot be said about the words in columns C, D, E, F and G.
The conclusion that we can come to is that Staat’s theory does not explain how
users of a language can form and understand grammatically correct sentences.

2.3.2.3. Skinner’s Sentence Frame Theory

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904 – 1990) was an American psychologist and
philosopher who devoted his work to the analysis of human behavior. His early
research activities culminated in his work Verbal Behaviour (1957)*.
According to him speakers of a language learn standard patterns or skeletal
frames as a basis for sentence composition. The skeletal frames are composed of key
responses – nouns, verbs and adjectives. Once we know these frames we can put
some more words to the frame – articles, modifiers, quantifiers etc. So for example
when we know the key responses happy and boy we can add words and compose the
sentence – The boy is happy.
Like the previous theories examined so far, Skinner’s theory allows for the
production of both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences that have the same
frames. For example:
Skeletal Noun Noun Verb Verb
frame:
The dog the woman found barked.
*Peter John found barked.
*The shoe the milk disappeared smiled.
Skinner also does not provide an explanation about the skeletal frames come
from. Apart from that he fails to explain how basic skeletal frames combine into more
wholes, i.e. how simple sentences become complex. It is Noam Chomsky (the founder
of transformational grammar) who provides an explanation of how basic sentences are
integrated into more complex ones. This is possible as a result of the existences of
transformational rules which Chomsky calls a particular type of language knowledge
that speakers of a language possess.
e.g.1)The dog barked.
the dog.
The woman found
*
Skinner, B. F. (1957) Verbal Behaviour. Copley Publishing Group.

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 2) Embedding sentence 2 into
sentence 1.
Deletion of the Direct object
–
a transformational rule
Final sentence: The dog the woman found barked.

The conclusion is: Skinner’s Sentence Frame theory fails to provide a sufficient
and adequate explanation of the basic abilities of speakers.

2.3.2.4. Fries’ Sentence Frame Theory

Charles Carpenter Fries (1887 – 1967) a linguist who devoted his work to the
methodology of English language teaching developed his own theory of language
acquisition (1952) which is similar to Skinner’s but with some modifications. Unlike
Skinner who claimed that speakers learn skeletal frames as a basis for sentence
composition, Fries believed that speakers learn the distributions of words in sentences
or said in other words – they learn “the sequence of all of the word classes in a
sentence frame, e.g. Article + Noun +Verb for The boy ran and not just the key
responses such as Noun and Verb” [Steinberg, 1982: 11]. Moreover, Fries believed
that speakers of a language learn how sentences are structured and that they were to
apply that knowledge when producing novel sentences.
Although Fries provided a theoretical framework which used the principle of
combinability of words, his theory (as well as the theories discussed previously) does
not explain structurally ambiguous or synonymous sentences. To illustrate this we will
use the sentences given by Skinner [1982:11-12]:
A. Structural ambiguity:
e.g. Oswald's shooting is remembered. – meaning 1: Oswald shot someone.
meaning 2: Oswald was shot.
Visiting relatives could be a nuisance. – meaning 1: Relatives that visit you are a
nuisance.
meaning 2: When you visit relatives
unpleasant things could happen to
you.
B. Synonymous sentences:

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e.g. The cat the girl bought escaped. is synonymous to The cat which the girl bought
escaped.

Overall conclusion: All behaviourist theories fail to explain how speakers can
produce and understand novel grammatical sentences.

2.3.3. Mentalist theories

The Mentalist Approach (Nativists’ Views) is based upon the idea that language
cannot be equated with behaviour because observed behaviour is the outward
manifestation of internal changes, which an organism might have undergone as a
result of learning. Furthermore, language learning is considered to be a result of habit
formation in which the desired behavior (correct use of language) is reinforced and
undesired behavior (language mistakes) is eradicated. This idea of Behaviourists
shows that there is someone else, and not the learner, who decides what is desirable
and what is not.
Contrary to Behaviourists the Mentalist view of language is that language is
internal, rule governed and abstract phenomenon. They believe that the human has
an innate predisposition towards language acquisition. This predisposition or
“programming” is what helps humans learn a language and it is the driving mechanism
through which children learn their first language rapidly. That innate ability of humans
to learn a language deteriorates with age and when people reach maturity it is almost
inoperative.
Noam Chomsky (1928 – present) is the representative of the mentalist view of
language learning. He is well known in the academic and scientific community as the
father of modern linguistics. He claims that a child learns his / her first language through
cognitive learning because a child is born with an innate capacity to process the
language (s)he hears. This innate capacity is called a language acquisition device,
which is used only for language acquisition and which contains a kind of blueprint of
how language works. When children learn their first language they apply some rules
that enable them to structure grammatically correct sentences. However, these rules
are unconsciously acquired by children and children themselves cannot explain them.
For example: a five year old child may make a sentence like I have eaten my breakfast
and (s)he may do that because (s)he has a mental grammar which enables him / her

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to construct a grammatically correct sentence; but the child would not be able to define
and explain that (s)he has used the Present Perfect tense.
The ideas of the Mentalists can be illustrated in the following way (Fig.2.1):

Language Mental Language Language

Input Grammar Acquisition Output
(own Device
rules)

Grammatical
sentences

Fig. 1.1. The Mentalist View on Language Learning

The ideas of Chomsky could be valid and applicable if it is assumed that all
children, wherever and whenever they are born, possess the same innate mechanism
for language acquisition.

2.3.4. Other theories

Two of the influential views that explore language acquisition are the Cognitive-
developmental and the Social-interactionist views. However, these two theories do not
provide an explanation of the basic language abilities of speakers but focus on the
ways people learn their mother tongue and on the factors that play an essential roles
in that process.
The cognitive-developmental views can be represented by the work of Eric
Heinz Lenneberg (1927 – 1975) was a linguist and neurologist born in Germany but
who due to his Jewish origin left the country during the World War II and moved to the
USA. He was a pioneer in the development of the concept of innateness in acquiring
language.
In 1967 he published his seminal book Biological Foundations of Language and
proposed the idea of the existence of a Critical Period Hypothesis for language
development which suggested that language acquisition is limited by the age. Further
studies (especially related to second or foreign language learning) have shown that
this is not valid and nowadays it is generally agreed that early language acquisition
has its advantages but adult learners of a language could also master the foreign
language.

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 The other view – that of the Social-interactionists developed increasingly in the
late 1970s and 1980s when developmental psychologists stressed the importance of
human social interaction and the role of adults and children relationships in learning.
One of the representatives of this view is Jerome Bruner (1915 – present) who called
the relationship between a child and a partner (e.g. mother, another relative, another
child) in which learning frameworks are provided scaffolding. For example when a child
is learning a language, the mother is the one who provides the framework for the
correct acquisition of the language.
Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934) used the term Zone of proximal development to
refer to the fact that children can do much more with the help of a person who has
greater knowledge than them. He explains that children move away from learning with
others to more independent thinking and behaviour.

2.4. CONCLUSION
In this section we have focused on the different theories that attempt to explain
the basic language abilities of speakers plus the views on language learning that lead
to the development of foreign language teaching methods, curricula and materials.
This was necessary as these ideas have had and still have a considerable influence
on the theories of language learning and teaching.

QUESTIONS
1. Which of the theories discussed explains language abilities of speakers in the best
way? What is missing in those theories?
2. What does each of the discussed approaches say about how people learn a
language? And what about how we should teach language?
3. Do you consider the idea of Chomsky that children have an innate mechanism for
learning languages an adequate one? Why? Why not?
4. Why do linguists say that Chomsky’s theory is applicable only when all children are
born with the same Language acquisition device?
5. Dell Hymes (1927 – 2009) (a famous American sociolinguist, anthropologists and
folklorist) suggests that mentalists and behaviourists theories restrict linguistics as
they do not examine language as means of communication. He suggests other
factors that should be taken in consideration when discussing human language
abilities and illustrates that by the following grammatically correct sentence: “The
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 mouse the cat the dog the man the woman married beat chased ate had a white
tale” [Johnson, 2008:57].
a) Try to explain what the sentence means – Start with splitting the sentence
into smaller sentences. Start with the mouse.
b) Which is the factor that Hymes talks about?

WORKSHEETS
Worksheet 1 – A Summary of Behaviourist and Mentalist Approaches

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