Revision Guide for the theories of Language Acquisition

There are four key theories to language acquisition:

v  Behaviourist

v  Cognition Theory

v  Innateness Theory

v  Social and cultural Theory

All of them describe different theories as to how a child can pick up and develop language through different means. The first we shall look at is behaviourist.

Behaviourist Theory

‘Children learn to speak by copying others and through positive and negative reinforcement’ – Skinner

This is also known as operant conditioning, where a child is rewarded for performing an action which encourages the behaviour for the future, or is punished where the behaviour is seen as negative, not to be done again. For example, if a child is good or completes a task well, the parent would reward them, encouraging the behaviour. If a child does not share, or does something wrong, the parents would punish the child.

Some linguists see language as a behaviour that is shaped by operant conditioning, as it is a subset of learned behaviours. If a particular response is reinforced, it should become habitual. This means that children will pick up the reinforced language and drop the ones that aren’t.  Once this behaviour is reinforced once, it would only need to be occasionally reinforced, meaning that speech sounds that appear less frequently will be dropped, causing the extinction of the sound. However children will make errors depending on the context or situation.

The argument for behaviourist theory is that language is based on learning, imitation, practice and selective reinforcement. However it does have its limitations or on what it misses out. Firstly, it is highly dependent on adults to have full control over this developing stage, when children do not understand the duality property of language. Children speak in words even adults don’t use, and there is retention of the use of cuss words. There is no reinforcement on abstracted ideas.

Cognition Theory

‘It involves the ability of the mind to conceptualise ‘–Piaget

It is a huge contrast to the behaviourist theory, as it involves putting objects through a schema in order to identify them. However, it does require an adult to confirm or correct what the child suspects.

For example, a child could learn about a dog through pictures, and understand that it has four legs, big ears and a tail. However, if a child was to see a cat, they would most likely call it a dog; this is where a parent would step in and correct the child, calling it a cat. The child then conceptualises the idea that a cat is different from a dog. 

This theory does make sense to an extent. A child learning its first language would collect a data base of schemas. For example, if a child learns about a dog, it would assume that everything with four legs would be a dog. However, his small sample size when researching, meaning that he could not make his hypothesis applicable to every child. Recent theory of mind research has found that 4- and 5-year-old children have a rather sophisticated understanding of their own mental processes as well as those of other people. For example, children of this age have some ability to take the perspective of another person, meaning they are far less egocentric than Piaget believed.

Innateness Theory

‘Humans – and so children – are born with the capacity for language acquisition’- Chomsky

The key concept of this idea is that there is a critical period for learning language and that, if passed; a child will be unable to learn a language. This is in three theories. The first is nativist, where there is a native capacity to learn language. The second is environmentalist, where there is an environment where it is easier for a child to learn language. The last is internationalist, where learning language depends on what the child is interacting with. This is so a child can naturally develop language without the need for formal training.

It links with the behaviourist theory, as part of the innateness theory is how the environment and external interactions shape the acquisition of language. It also links to the cognitive theory, for the interactions developing language.

A weakness to the theory is that it does not always apply to every case, e.g. the child ‘Genie’ was suspected of missing the learning critical period for language. However, it was unclear whether it was her years of abuse that prevented her learning, or if she had a mental disability for learning. This could then apply for other children in similar situations.

Social/Cultural Theory

‘Parents adapt their speech to allow maximum learning of language to take place’ – Vygotsky

The idea is that the key point of language is to make meaning. This supports the idea that parents use monosyllabic words and more nouns in order to create meaning to the child, therefore making the child semantically remember the words. It contrasts the cognition theory, as learning should be done on a cultural basis, learning through interactions, rather than reward and punishment for correct/incorrect language use. It links to the behaviourist and innateness theory as interactions are key to it in order to create meaning to the language.

This graph shows a contrast between the cognitive theory and the social theory.

 

 

A weakness for this theory is that the main criticism of Vygotsky's work concerns the assumption that it is relevant to all cultures. Rogoff dismisses the idea that Vygotsky's ideas are culturally universal and instead states the concept of scaffolding - which is heavily dependent on verbal instruction - may not be equally useful in all cultures for all types of learning. Indeed, in some instances observation and practice may be more effective ways of learning certain skills.