Theories of Language Acquisition

Theories of Language Acquisition

The nature vs. nurture debate extends to the topic of language acquisition. Today, most researchers acknowledge that both nature and nurture play a role in language acquisition. However, some researchers emphasize the influences of learning on language acquisition, while others emphasize biological influences.

Receptive Language before Expressive Language

Children’s ability to understand language develops faster than their ability to speak it. Receptive language is the ability to understand language, and expressive language is the ability to use language to communicate. If a mother tells her fifteen-month-old child to put the toy back in the toy chest, he may follow her instructions even though he can’t repeat them himself.

Environmental Influences on Language Acquisition

A major proponent of the idea that language depends largely on the environment was the behaviorist B. F. Skinner (see pages 145 and 276 for more information on Skinner). He believed that language is acquired through principles of conditioning, including association, imitation, and reinforcement.

According to this view, children learn words by associating sounds with objects, actions, and events. They also learn words and syntax by imitating others. Adults enable children to learn words and syntax by reinforcing correct speech.

Critics of this idea argue that a behaviorist explanation is inadequate. They maintain several arguments:

•  Learning cannot account for the rapid rate at which children acquire language.
•  There can be an infinite number of sentences in a language. All these sentences cannot be learned by imitation.
•  Children make errors, such as overregularizing verbs. For example, a child may say Billy hitted me, incorrectly adding the usual past tense suffix -ed to hit. Errors like these can’t result from imitation, since adults generally use correct verb forms.
• Children acquire language skills even though adults do not consistently correct their syntax.

Neural Networks

Some cognitive neuroscientists have created neural networks, or computer models, that can acquire some aspects of language. These neural networks are not preprogrammed with any rules. Instead, they are exposed to many examples of a language. Using these examples, the neural networks have been able to learn the language’s statistical structure and accurately make the past tense forms of verbs. The developers of these networks speculate that children may acquire language in a similar way, through exposure to multiple examples.

Biological Influences on Language Acquisition

The main proponent of the view that biological influences bring about language development is the well-known linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky argues that human brains have a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate mechanism or process that allows children to develop language skills. According to this view, all children are born with a universal grammar, which makes them receptive to the common features of all languages. Because of this hard-wired background in grammar, children easily pick up a language when they are exposed to its particular grammar.

Evidence for an innate human capacity to acquire language skills comes from the following observations:

•  The stages of language development occur at about the same ages in most children, even though different children experience very different environments.
•  Children’s language development follows a similar pattern across cultures.
•  Children generally acquire language skills quickly and effortlessly.
•  Deaf children who have not been exposed to a language may make up their own language. These new languages resemble each other in sentence structure, even when they are created in different cultures.