4 approaches to child language acquisition

Cognitivism:

• Jean Piaget

• Cognitive development (understanding) must precede linguistic development, i.e understanding and thought must come before language is realised 

• Language reflects thought processes, but thought processes affect language 

• Language does not contribute to the development of thinking 

• Suggests that cognition plays a primary role in the development of emotional and behavioural responses

• Directly links language acquisition to intellectual development 

• Children will only be able to produce linguistic structures for which they understand the underlying concepts behind it

e.g. The production of past tense, once the concept of time is understood

• Piaget’s stages of acquisition

  Piaget suggested children reason and think differently at different stages of their lives. Language develops gradually as they move onto the next stage of thinking development.

   

  • Sensorimotor stage: Up to 2; learning about the physical word; developing motor skills

  • Preoperational stage: 2-6; developing ability to think of symbols and form words from ideas

  • Concrete operations stage: 7-12; develop logic and reasoning; begin to consider the ideas of others

  Formal operations stage: Up to 15; complex language system develops fully

• Evidence = over and under extension

  • Criticism:

• Behaviourists were reluctant to study because cognition occurs inside the ‘black box’ of the brain

• It is difficult to make precise connections between cognitive and linguistic developmental stages

Behaviourism:

• Theorist: B.F. Skinner (American Psychologist) (Radical Behaviourism)

• Language learning is because (language input from other speakers) and effect (the production of speech)’, otherwise known as ‘stimulus and response’ 

• Imitation

• Language is learnt like any other habit/behaviour, through external stimuli

• All behaviours can be explained without the need to consider internal mental states or consciousness

• Caregivers reinforce and ‘correct’ children’s utterances, forming the basis for their knowledge of language

• Only humans can acquire language. It is an independent system, separate from cognition

  • Evidence

• Imitation

• Positive and negative reinforcement

  • Criticism:

• Children do not automatically pick up ‘correct’ forms from imitation

• Grammatical structures do not seem to be assimilated by imitation

• Fails to explain how children are able to produce structures they have not heard before

Innateness:

• Noam Chomsky

• Developed in the mid-20th century (1959)

• It came about as a reaction to Skinner’s Behaviourism. It is a complete contradiction to Behaviourist ideas 

• The nativist idea has been around for hundreds of years, but Chomsky ‘breathed new life’ into it as it became particularly prominent

• Children are born with an in-built capacity for language development 

• The brain has a LAD (Language Acquisition Device), that is biologically programmed for speech, and when the brain is exposed to speech, it will automatically be able to start understanding and producing a system of language 

• The LAD provides us with an innate understanding and ability to systematically discover the grammatical rules that underpin language. The specificities of these rules are refined through trial and error

  • Evidence

• Virtuous errors (over application of grammatical/morphological rules that demonstrate an understanding of the grammatical/morphological system

• Application of various morphemes 

• Use of grammatical structures that are not evidence by the caregiver/ability to produce utterances they have never heard before or have not been directly copied

  • Criticism

• LAD is an abstract concept that requires scientific evidence 

• The theory is heavily based on the learner’s linguistic competence, which is again an abstract phenomenon.

• The theory places more emphasis on the linguistic competence of adult native speakers, but not enough on the developmental aspects of language acquisition.

Social Interaction:

Theorist: Vygotsky (Russian Psychologist)/Bruner (American Psychologist)

• Places emphasis on the social element to language acquisition. Children will signal the want to learn language, and can only learn language from someone who wants to communicate with them

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Model

• Cultural development happens when children observe others interacting, then the child is later able to develop the behaviours to communicate in this way

• Children learn best when interacting with others during problem solving. Interaction between adult and child begins as adult led, where the adult talks at the child. The child then emerges as a communicator in their own right, and goes from gurgling to producing full, standard utterances. This happens through interaction with the adult, and collaborative problem solving 

Bruner’s learning development theory

• Learners, whether they are adults or children, learn best when they discover knowledge for themselves

• Interaction between adult and child builds the structure of language long before the child is able to produce any

  • Evidence:

• CDS (Child Directed Speech)

• Language where the child is clearly attempting to involve themselves in the social sphere, such as questions from the caregiver (consider Halliday’s ‘Heuristic’ speech function)

• Questions from the caregiver

• Interaction that is clearly functioning to form social bonds (consider Halliday’s ‘Interactional’ speech function)

• Collaborative interaction (consider Halliday’s ‘Imaginative’ speech function, in some cases)

  • Criticism:

• Although there are observable benefits to caregiver speech, it has never been possible to identify precise links between language structures used by parents and their appearance in the child’s language.

• Aitchison suggests caregiver speech is often non-standard, and so may hinder a child’s acquisition of standard/target speech.