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1.1 APPROACHES OF LANGUAGES ACQUISITION

1.2 THEORIES OF LANGUAGES ACQUISITION
1.2.1 BEHAVIORISM THEORY
1.2.1.1 POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT
1.2.1.2 NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT
1.2.2 INPUT THEORY

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2.1 EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE

2.2 TERRACE, PETITTO, SANDERS, & BEVER ARGUE

2.3 THE COURSE OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

2.4. á
 

2.4.1 PRINCIPLES AND PARAMETERS

2.4.2  áá



 



 
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Language acquisition is one of the central topics in cognitive science.

Every theory of cognition has tried to explain it; probably no other topic has

aroused such controversy. Possessing a language is the quintessentially

human trait: all normal humans speak, no n onhuman animal does. Language is

the main vehicle by which we know about other people's thoughts, and the two

must be intimately related. Every time we speak we are revealing something

about language, so the facts of language structure are easy to come by; these

data hint at a system of extraordinary complexity. Nonetheless, learning a first

language is something every child does successfully, in a matter of a few years

and without the need for formal lessons. With language so close to the core of

what it means to be human, it is not surprising that children's acquisition of

language has received so much attention. Anyone with strong views about the

human mind would like to show that children's first few steps are steps in the

right direction.


 


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According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learner¶s Dictionary a theory

is a set of properly argued ideas intended to explain facts and events. Ideas,
beliefs or claims about something which may or may not be found true in
practice. According to the definition of Longman¶s Dictionary of
Contemporary English, a theory is an idea or a set of ideas that is intended
to explain something about life or the world specially that has not yet been
proved to be true.

 




1-Acquisition is a process where by children become speakers of their

native language.

2-Acquisition is a process by which language capabilities of a person

increases.

 

 



The various theories and approaches have been emerged over the years to
study and analyze the process of language acquisition. Four main schools of
thought, who provide theoretical paradigms in guiding the course of
language acquisition, are:

 
  ! "#!  : based on the empiricist or
behavioral approach.
 ""  ! "$  : based on the rationalistic or mentalist
approach.
 %: based on the cognitive-psychological approach.
 #"!" " ! &' based on the maternal approach to language
acquisition.


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The process of learning language has always been a complex
phenomenon among the critics. It is an acknowledged fact that the lap
of mother is the first educational center for the child and the foundation
of every human activity is laid when a child uses the lap of the mother,
the only shelter of man. In this way this has always been a debatable
question how for the lap of mother, the surroundings and the entire
atmosphere in which a child lives, proves helpful in learning language
one.

According to skinner child acquires his first speech through a process

which is called the operant process. Operant process means that
language is an activity that a child acquires volunta rily without any
external force. In this way child acquires his language one in his own
free will without any sort of pressure. According to skinner the whole
process is based upon four elements: m
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In operant conditioned, reinf orcement plays a vital role. There are two kinds of
reinforcement:

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Positive reinforcement comprises of praises and rewards. It has been

shown by the experiments that positive reinforcement works much better in
bringing about good learning.

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Rebukes and punishments fall into t he negative reinforcement category.

Skinner eventually applies his theory of learning through operant

conditioning to the study of how humans learn language.

Behaviorists believe that learning a language is no different from learning

anything else; it becomes a habit by the stimulus-response-reinforcement-
repetition process. The behaviorists also claim that we learn by imitation and by
association. For instance, a young child hears a word 'apple' every time he is
given one. He soon associates the word 'apple' with the actual thing. He then
makes this sound himself, imitating what he has heard. His parents are pleased
that he has learnt another word and so his response is reinforced. The thoughts
of behaviorist school can well be understood ac cording to following tree
diagram:

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 Psycholinguists argue that imitation is not enough; it is not merely by
mechanical repetition that children acquire language. They also acquire it by
natural exposure.

1.2.2 
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The study of Motherese in the 1970¶s focused upon the maternal input. C. A.
Ferguson (1977) argument, parents do not talk to their children in the same
way as they talk to other adults and seem to be capable of adapting their
language to give the child maximum opportunity to in teract and learn

The utterances of the parents are considerably and subconsciously simplified

especially with respect to grammar and meaning and sentences are shorter

The meanings conveyed by mothers are predominantly concrete and there is

a more restricted range of sentences

Extra information is provided that would be considered unnecessary while

talking otherwise

Sentences are expanded and paraphrased . There is also an expressive and

affective element in motherese, manifested in the form of special words and
sound; in the form of diminutive and reduplicative words





 

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Acoording to Rague Arias ³Communication is a human need, what .However doubt, it
well often the man has an equal or greater need, which is the impulse to think, you
need to think. I could not do without the language .Chomsky puts a very instructive
example. The case of an individual detained in a jail for political reasons. Nobody will
ever know, minus his captors, what are your ideas and your thoughts, but this does not
mean you cannot recreate them in his cell or covertly writing them, if given the
situation. However doubt he has done or declare their crimes, and less, to the
police. But certainly lying in his bunk, will give many turns to his crimes here this man is
using language not to communicate anything, but to meet that need or unstoppable
momentum of man to t hink, to go and review what's omited . He used language ³ 

Has pointed at N. Chomsky. ³The scientific study of language acquisition began around
the same time as the birth of cognitive science, in the late 1950's. We can see now why
that is not a coincidence. The historical catalyst was Noam Chomsky's review of
Skinner's Verbal Behavior (Chomsky, 1959). At that time, Anglo -American natural
science, social science, and philosophy had come to a virtual consensus about the
answers to the questions listed above. The mind consisted of sensor motor abilities
plus a few simple laws of learning governing gradual changes in an organism's
behavioral repertoire. Therefore language must be learned, it cannot be a module, and
thinking must be a form of verbal behavior, since verbal behavior is the prime
manifestation of "thought" that can be observed externally. Chomsky argued that
language acquisition falsified these beliefs in a single stroke: children learn languages
that are governed by highly subtle and abstract principles, and they do so without
explicit instruction or any o ther environmental clues to the nature of such principles.
Hence language acquisition depends on an innate, species -specific module that is
distinct from general intelligence. Much of the debate in language acquisition has
attempted to test this once -revolutionary, and still controversial, collection of ideas. The
implications extend to the rest of human cognition. ³

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³Though artificial chimp signaling systems have some analogies to human language
(e.g., use in communication, combinations of more basic signals), it seems unlikely that
they are homologous. Chimpanzees require massive regimented teaching sequences
contrived by humans to acquire quite rudimentary abilities, mostly limited to a small
number of signs, strung together in repetitive, quasi -random sequences, used with the
intent of requesting food or tickling.. This contrasts sharply with human children, who
pick up thousands of words spontaneously, combine them in structured sequences
where every word ha s a determinate role, respect the word order of the adult language,
and use sentences for a variety of purposes such as commenting on interesting
objects³.


 
 





Has point at Mac Whinney & Snow ³Although scholars have kept diaries of their
children's speech for over a century (Charles Darwin was one of the first), it was only
after portable tape -recorders became available in the late 1950's that children's
spontaneous speech began to be analyzed systematically within develop mental
psychology. These naturalistic studies of children's spontaneous speech have become
even more accessible now that they can be put into computer files and can be
disseminated and analyzed automatically. They are complemented by experimental
methods. In production tasks, children utter sentences to describe pictures or scenes,
in response to questions, or to imitate target sentences. In comprehension tasks, they
listen to sentences and then point to pictures or act out events with toys. In Ê judgment
asks, they indicate whether or which sentences provided by an experimenter sound
"silly" to them. ³
OÊ


ÊÊ

N. Chomsky defines; ³the children are born with an innate capacity for language
development. The human brain is µready¶ for language, so much so that when children
are exposed to speech they pick it up naturally and begin to work out the underlying
rules for themselves. In this view, children have a


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which enables them to make sense of the utterances they hear. ´


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U According to UG, the learner¶s initial state is supposed to consist of a set of

universal principles common to all human languages

—     

U This principle states that language is organized in such a way that it crucially
depends on the structural relationships between elements in a sentence

U Words are regrouped into higher -level structures which are the units which form
the basis of language

U All languages are made up of sentences which consist of at le ast a Noun-

Phrase and a Verb-Phrase, which in turn optionally contain other phrases or
even whole sentences

U The hierarchical nature of human language is a part of human mind therefore

children use computationally structure -dependent rules

?
@ @

Piaget supports that the language development is related to cognitive development,

that is, the development of the child¶s thinking determines when the child can learn to
speak and what the child can say. For example, before a child can say, ³This car is
bigger than that one´, s/he must have developed the ability to judge differences in size .
In Piaget¶s view, children learn to talk µnaturally¶ when they are µready¶ without any
deliberate teaching by adults ³.

³Language and Thought. Is language simply grafted on top of cognition as a way of

sticking communicable labels onto thoughts or does learning a language somehow
mean learning to think in that language? A famous hypothesis, outlined by Benjamin
Whorf (1956), asserts that the categories and relations that we use to understand the
world come from our particular language, so that speakers of different languages
conceptualize the world in different ways. Language acquisition, then, would be
learning to think, not just learning to talk. ³


 



 



 So to sum up the discussion we may say that although skinner¶s theory

was challenged by Chomsky yet the paved the way for the other
language scholars to test their abilities and solve the mystery of child¶s
first language acquisition.

 General perception is that there is no difference between the way one

learns a language and the way one learns to do anything else.

 Most psychologists of language agree with Behaviorism may not tell us

much about the way in which we learn our mother tongue, but it can point
to successful strategies in the learning of a foreign language when we
are older.

 Finally, after analyzing the theories about language acquisition, such as

Behaviorism Mentalist and others it can be concluded that Chomsky
subscribes to an entirely different view of learning from that of
behaviorists. He follows a mentalist approach which means something
which involves the mind and the thought processes.




 
 Ô 

Chomsky N., ³Acquisition o Acquisition of Syntax in Children ³ (1969: PP. 5-10)

Macwhinney B. ³Mechanism of language acquisition ³. (1987: PP:12 -271- 296)

Rague Arias, José M.ʳEntrevista a Noam Chomsky. EN: Revolución En La



 
 ³OÊ

Ê  Ê


 Ê Ê-Ê

Piaget, J. ³The language and thought of the child´ New York: Routledge &
Kegan Paul. (1926)

Terrace, h., Petitto, L. A., Sanders, R. J. & Bever, T. G. ³Can an ape create a
sentence? Science³ (1979: PP.206 ± 891 ± 902)

Harmer Jeremy ³The practice of English language teaching´ 3 rd ed. LOGMAN.

(2003:PP 71-72)

Web:

www.slideshare.net : ³L1 and L2 acquisition´

www.slideshare.net: Input Theory

www.northallertoncoll.org.uk/english/elangacquisition.htm

www.northallertoncoll.org.uk/english/elangacquisition.htm