LANGUAGE

ACQUISITION
TEAM #2

How do children acquire language?

How it happen?

Children acquire language quickly, easily,

biological
and without effort or formal teaching. It
happens automatically, whether their
parents try to teach them or not.

How do children acquire language?

How it happen?

Children learn grammar by

memorizing the words and
sentences of their language

Is the childrens acquisition of

language a normal process?
Language learning is natural. Babies are born with the
ability to learn it and that learning begins at birth. All
children, no matter what language their parents speak,
learn language much the same way. This learning takes
place in three basic stages.
Stage One Learning Sounds
Stage Two Learning Words
Stage Three Learning Sentences

There are some theories about children

s language
Three main schools of thought, which provide
theoretical paradigms in guiding the course of
language acquisition are:
Behaviorist Theory
Innatist Theory
Cognitivist theory

Theory

Central idea

Behaviorist Children imitate adults. Their correct

Linguist

Skinner

utterances are reinforced when they get

what they want or are praised.

Innate

Language is an innate capacity. A child's

Chomsky

brain contains special language-learning

mechanisms at birth.

Cognitive

Lang. is just one aspect of a childs

Piaget

overall intellectual development

Language is a symbolic representation
which allow the children to abstract the
world.

Lev
Vygotsky

Behaviorism

Burrhus Frederic Skinner

(March 20,1904-August 18,1990)

An American Psychologist

Proposed operant conditioning as

compared to classical conditioning
of Pavlov.

According to Skinner, learning a language

operates on the same principles that a rat will
use to learn a maze or to learn to press a
button.

Behaviorists' views:

Behaviorists view the process of language acquisition as a building

process that results from interaction with the environment.

It is also called imitation theory which is based on an empirical or

behavioral approach.

Children start out as clean slates and language learning is a process

of getting linguistic habits printed on these slates.

Language is a conditioned behavior: the stimulus response process

Stimulus

Response

Feedback

Reinforcement

All behavior is learned and that humans enter the world with no
innate abilities.

IMITATION AND POSITIVE

REINFORCEMENT
By imitating adults and repeating what they
hear
Limitations:

Based on observations

Unanswered:

Mistakes: indicate application of rules, not just

imitation (intelligent mistakes)
o Feedback
o

Governed

by Truth value rather than syntax

Innateness Theory
By Noam Chomsky (born 1928---Present)
Was born on December 7th, 1928.
American linguist, philosopher,
cognitive scientist, historian, and
activist.
Father of modern linguistics"
His work has influenced fields such
as computer science, mathematics,
and psychology.
He is also known as an intellectual
dissent.

INNATENESS HYPOTHESIS:
innatist theory
Nature over Nurture
An

According

to Chomsky, crucial parts of

the human language ability are built
into the brain part of our biology,
programmed into our genes

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE

Supposed to be an Organ of brain
Intractable complexity of language acquisition
Assumed Components

technique for representing input signals

o a way of representing structural information about
them
o some initial delimitation of the class of possible
language structure hypotheses
o a method for determining meaning of hypotheses for
each sentence
o

THE LAD (Chomsky, 1965)

The

language
acquisition Device
(LAD) is a postulated
organ of the brain
that is supposed to
function as a
congenital device for
learning symbolic
language (i.e.,
language acquisition).

Universal grammar

We are born with set of rules about language in our brains.

What does U.G. (Universal Grammar) have?

Chomsky says:
The UG does not have the actual rules of each language
but it has PRINCIPLES & PARAMETERS.

The rules of language are derived from the Principles &

parameters.

Principles & Parameters:

Principles: are the universal basic features of Grammar

e.g.. Nouns, Verbs & Structure Dependency etc.

Parameters: are the variation across language that

determines one or more aspects of Grammar e.g. Pro,
Drop and Head Direction.
The Parameters are set during Language Acquisition.

INNATENESS

Innate capabilities of language learning

o

Language Acquisition Device

assumed

to have Syntactic structures

They only learn words

Explains intelligent mistakes (with LAD)

Limitations

Only focus is on grammar

o Syntactic structures: Language dependent, Innate??
o Explaining LAD?
o

Mechanism of Innate Theory

According to Noam Chomsky, the mechanism of

language acquisition formulates from innate processes.

Innatist

Behaviorist

IMITATION VS INSTINCT
Language

Child

Environment

It is a subset of all
learned behaviors

A clean slate

It is a source of
language models
and provides
selective
reinforcements

All languages have

characteristics in
grammatical
structure that are
universal (UG)

Born with
syntactic
knowledge for
analyzing
linguistic input

The input from

the environment
is degenerate
but necessary for
triggering
innate knowledge

STEVEN PINKER
WHO IS HE?

Steven pinker is a
psychologist
He is a famous writer on
language, mind and human
nature.
He was born in 1954, he
earned a bachelors degree in
experimental psychology at
McGill University in 1976.
Steven Pinker is an
experimental psychologist
who is interested in all
aspects of language and the
mind.

Steven Pinkers Theory

Pinker argues that humans are born with an
innate capacity for language. He deals
sympathetically with Noam Chomsky's claim
that all human language shows evidence of
a universal grammar, but dissents from
Chomsky's skepticism that evolutionary
theory can explain the human language
instinct.
Blind children, whose access to the
nonlinguistic world is obviously
severely limited, learn language
without many problems.

StevenPinker

He tries to combine the ideas of Noam

Chomsky and Charles Darwin in his book,
The Language Instinct. He offers an
explanation for how natural selection
might have shaped the evolution of
human's
"innate
grammar.

How Children
learn
Language?

Conclusion
Humans do have a better biological evolved body
for language
Certain traits such as sound processing are
innate to infants
Children learn language remarkably fast
Interesting patterns are present in child
language acquisition process
Various theories have been proposed

Behaviorist Theory
Innatist Theory
Cognitivist theory

References

www.wikipedia.org
Language Acquisition,
Steve Pinker, Draft
version
pandora.cii.wwu.edu
Language Acquisition,
Elena Lieven, School of
Psychological
Sciences,University of
Manchester
Language Acquisition,
Michel Frank