Acquisition of Language

1. Behaviorist learning theory. Derived from a general theory of

learning, the behaviorist view states that the language behavior of the
individual is conditioned by sequences of differential rewards in
his/her environment.

It regards language learning as a behavior like other forms of human

behavior, not a mental phenomenon, learned by a process of habit
formation. Since language is viewed as mechanistic and as a human
activity, it is believed that learning a language is achieved by building
up habits on the basis of stimulus-response chains. Behaviorism
emphasizes the consequences of the response and argues that it is the
behavior that follows a response which reinforces it and thus helps to
strengthen the association.

According to Littlewood (1984), the process of habit formation

includes the following:

a. The child imitates the sounds and patterns which s/he hears around
her/him.
b. People recognize the childs attempts as being similar to the adult
models and reinforce (reward) the sounds by approval or some
other desirable reaction.
c. In order to obtain more of these rewards, the child repeats the
sounds and patterns so that these become habits.
d. In this way the childs verbal behavior is conditioned (shaped)
until the habits coincide with the adult models.

The behaviorists claim that the three crucial elements of learning are:
a stimulus, which serves to elicit behavior; a response triggered by
the stimulus, and reinforcement, which serves to mark the response
as being appropriate (or inappropriate) and encourages the repetition
(or suppression) of the response.

2. Cognitive learning theory. Chomsky argues that language is not

acquired by children by sheer imitation and through a form of
conditioning on reinforcement and reward. He believes that all normal
human beings have an inborn biological internal mechanism that
makes language learning possible. Cognitivists/ innatists claim that
the child is born with an initial state about language which
predisposes him/her to acquire a grammar of that language. They
maintain that the language acquisition device (LAD) is what the child
brings to the task of language acquisition, giving him/her an active
role in language learning.

One important feature of the mentalist account of second language

acquisition is hypothesis testing, a process of formulating rules and
testing the same with competent speakers of the target language.