The passage discusses different perspectives on language acquisition in children: 1) The innatist/nativist perspective championed by Noam Chomsky, which argues that children are born with innate linguistic knowledge and abilities that allow them to acquire complex grammar even from limited environmental input. 2) The interactionist/developmental perspective, which sees both innate abilities and environmental influences as important. Jean Piaget's work showed how cognitive development influences language acquisition. Lev Vygotsky emphasized the role of social interaction and cooperation with more knowledgeable individuals. 3) The interactionist view sees language acquisition as one example of human learning abilities, influenced by cognitive and social development through interactions with the environment, rather than as an innate,

1.  In the following exchange, the linguist parent is attempting to
correct the child (learning English as an L1).
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
Parent: No, say nobody likes me.
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
 The child and parent repeat this exchange eight times. Then,
exasperated at the parent who seems more interested in
grammar than in what is being expressed, the child says with
some passion:
Child: Oh, nobody don’t likes me.
Two questions:
1. What does this example suggest to you about the role of
habit formation in L1?
2. Where does the child’s incorrect sentence Nobody don’t like
me come from? Where does the child get it from?

2. Question: What does «putted» suggest us about
child L1 acquisition?
 Child: I putted the plates on the table.
 Mom: You mean, I put the plates on the table.
 Child: No, I putted them on all by myself.

3. The input that the child receives from the environment is not perfect and is full of false
starts, slips of tongue etc. So, how does a child reach L1 competence?

4. Criticisms on behaviorism:
Behaviorism seems to offer a reasonable way of understanding
how children learn some of the regular and routine aspects of
language, especially at earlier stages. However, children who do
little overt imitation acquire language as fully and rapidly as
those who imitate alot. And although behaviorism goes some
way to explaining the sorts of overgeneralizations that children
make, classical behaviorism is not a satisfactory explanation
for the acquisition of the more complex grammar that children
acquire.

5. • Criticisms on behaviorism:
Imitation and practice alone cannot explain
some of the forms created by children. Children
appear to pick out patterns and generalize them
to new contexts. They create new forms or new
uses of words.

6. The Innatist
Perspective
&
Noam Chomsky

7. Noam Chomsky
• Born in Philadelphia on December
7, 1928, Noam Chomsky was an
intellectual prodigy who went on to
earn a PhD in linguistics at the
University of Pennsylvania. Since
1955, he has been a professor at
MIT and has produced
groundbreaking, controversial
theories on human linguistic
capacity. Chomsky is widely
published, both on topics in his
field and on issues of dissent and
U.S. foreign policy.

8. The innatist perspective (Mentalism or
nativist approach)
• The innatists perspective is the belief that the mind
(and all things associated with it, like consciousness,
thoughts, etc.) is important for determining not just
human behavior, but also the way we ‘do’ science.
• The linguist Noam Chomsky claims that children are
biologically programmed for language and that
language develops in the child in just the same
way that other biological functions develop. For
example, every child will learn to walk as long as
adequate nourishment and reasonable freedom of
movement are provided. The child does not have to
be taught. Most children learn to walk about the
same age, and walking is essentially the same in all
normal human beings.

9. The Innatist Perspective
• The innatist perspective is related to
Chomsky’s hypothesis that all human
languages are based on some universal
principles.

10. The Innatist Perspective
• The role of environment in language acquisition
is slight.
• The role of mind (the child’s biological
endowment) in language acquisition is
supreme.
Environment
Mind

11. The Innatist Perspective
Poverty of Stimulus
• The language the child is exposed to in the environment is
full of confusing information (for example false starts,
incomplete sentences, or slips of tongue) and does not
provide all the information which the child needs.
• It is well known that children make mistakes during the
course of acquiring their mother tongue, but they are
neither corrected, nor do they pay much attention to these
corrections. If this is the case, how do they recover from
their mistakes?
• We end up knowing far more about language than is
exemplified in the language we hear around us.

12. The Innatist Perspective
• According to Chomsky, children’s minds are
not blank slates to be filled by imitating
language they hear in the environment.
Instead, he hypothesized, children are born
with a specific innate ability to discover for
themselves the underlying rules of a language
system on the basis of the samples of a
language they are exposed to. (Examples on
pages 20 and 21)

13. The Innatist Perspective
Poverty of Stimulus and Transformational Linguistics
(1) John is easy to please S+A+V
(2) John is eager to please S+A+V
(3) It is easy to please John
(4) *It is eager to please John
These two sentences would be described as having an
identical Surface structure, but the English speaker knows
that in first case "John" is the subject of "eager to please”
i.e. John pleases other people; and that in the second case
"John" is the object of "easy to please” i.e. other people
please John.

14. 1. John saw himself.
It looks as if the reflexive pronoun must follow
the noun it refers to. But the following sentence
disproves this.
2. Looking after himself bores John.

15. 1. John said that Fred liked himself.
2.*John said that Fred liked himself.
3. John told Bill to wash himself.
4. *John told Bill to wash himself.
We might conclude that the closest noun phrase is
usually the antecedent. However, the following
statement shows that this rule won’t work either.
5. John promised Bill to wash himself.

16. 1. John believes himself to be intelligent (non-
finite).
2. *John believes that himself is intelligent (finite
clause).
• The reflexive can be in the subject position in (1)
but not in (2).
• In some cases more than one antecedent is
possible, as in (3) where the reflexive could refer
to either John or Bill
(3) John showed Bill a picture of himself.
How do children discover the rules about reflexive
pronouns?

17. The Innatist Perspective
• Researchers who study language acquisition from
the innatist perspective argue that such complex
grammar could never be learned purely on the
basis of imitation and practicing the sentences
available in the input.
• They hypothesize that since all children acquire
the language of their environment, they must
have some innate mechanism or knowledge that
allows them to discover such complex syntax in
spite of limitations of the input.

18. Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
• Chomsky claimed the existence
of innate properties of language
to explain the child’s mastery of a
native language in such a short
time despite the highly abstract
nature of the rules of a language.
This innate knowledge, according
to Chomsky, was embodied in a
metaphorical «little black box»
in the brain, a language
acquisition device (LAD).

19. Interactionist/Developmental
Perspectives
• Developmental and cognitive psychologists have
focused on the interplay between the innate learning
ability of children and the environment in which they
develop.
• They argue that innatists place too much emphasis on
the final state and not on the developmental aspects of
language acquisition.

20. Interactionist/Developmental
Perspectives
• In their view, language acquisition is but one
example of the human child’s ability to learn
from experience, and they see no need to
assume that there are specific brain structures
devoted to language acquisition.
• They hypothesize that what children need to
know is essentially available in the language they
are exposed to as they hear it used in thousands
of hours of interactions with people and objects
around them.

21. Interactionist/Developmental
Perspectives
• Psychologists attribute considerably more
importance to the environment than the
innatists do even though they also recognize a
powerful learning mechanism in the human
brain.
• They see language acquisition as similar to and
influenced by the acquisition of other kinds of
skill and knowledge, rather than as something
that is different from and largely independent of
the child’s experience and cognitive
development.
Environment Mind

22.  Jean Piaget (9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a
Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known
for his epistemological studies with children.
Interactionist/Developmental
Perspectives

23. INTERACTIONIST/DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES
 In the early decades of the 20th century, Piaget
observed infants and children in their play and in
their interaction with objects and people. He was
able to trace the development of their cognitive
understanding of such things as object
permanence, the stability of quantities regardless of
changes in their appearance, and logical
inferencing. object permanence .mp4Object
Permanence Experiment.mp4Conservation
task.mp4
 Thus, Piaget argued that children’s language
development is built on their cognitive
development.

24. INTERACTIONIST/DEVELOPMENTAL
PERSPECTIVES
 It is easy to see how children’s cognitive
development would partly determine how they
acquire language. For example, the use of certain
terms such as «bigger» or «more» depends on the
children’s understanding of the concepts they
represent.
 The developing cognitive understanding is built on
the interaction between the child and the things
that can be observed or manipulated.

25. Interactionist/Developmental
Perspectives
Lev Vygotsky
(1896 – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet Belarusian
psychologist, the founder of a theory of human
cultural and biosocial development commonly
referred to as cultural-historical psychology.

26. Sociocultural theory: Emphasizes role in
development of cooperative dialogues between
children and more knowledgeable members of
society. Children learn the culture of their
community (ways of thinking and behaving)
through these interactions.

27. Interactionist/Developmental
Perspectives
• Vygotsky argued that language develops
primarily from social interaction. He argued
that in a supportive interactive environment ,
children are able to advance to higher levels of
knowledge and performance.

28. • Vygotsky
• Zone of Proximal Development: is the area
where a child cannot solve a problem alone, but
can be successful under adult guidance or in
collaboration with a more advanced peer.

29. Interactionist/Developmental
Perspectives
Scaffolding:
Vygotsky observed the importance of conversations
that children have with adults and with other
children and saw in these conversations the origins
of both language and thought.
The conversations provide the child with
scaffolding, that is, a kind of supportive structure
that helps them acquire new knowledge.
Scaffolding Language Skills.mp4

30. Interactionist/Developmental
Perspectives
Scaffolding: Support for learning and problem
solving. The support could be clues, reminders,
encouragement, breaking the problem down
into steps, providing an example, or anything
else that allows the student to grow in
independence as a learner.

31. The Interactional Instinct
John Schumann Namhee Lee Anna Joaquin Lisa Mikesell
Gail Adams Bahiyyih Hardacre Jessica Roehrig

32. • A biologically instantiated language organ is not
a requirement for the emergence of language.
• Language is a culturally inherited artifact whose
transmission requires social agents who are
hardwired with an instinct to interact.
• Several behavioral manifestations displayed by
infants represent their interactional readiness
and innate capacity to interact with
conspecifics. (Read the importance of
interaction part on page 27)

33. Interactional
Readiness
Imitate
several
actions
Follow gaze
Focus more
on humans
than
objects
Joint
attention
Express and
read emotions

34. • Neuropeptides such as vasopressin, oxytocin,
and dopamine are produced during infant-
caregiver interaction.
As these opiates are released during the
interactions, infants are psychologically
rewarded due to the morphine like effects of
these opiates.

35. The Study of Second Language
Acquisition
• What is the study of second language acquisition?
1. It is the study of how second languages are learned.
2. It is the study of how learners create a new language
system with only limited exposure to a second language.
3. It is the study of what is learned in a second language
and what is not learned.
4. It is the study of why most second language learners do
not achieve the same degree of proficiency in a second
language as they do in their native language.
5. It is the study of why some learners appear to achieve
native-like proficiency in more than one language.

36. The Study of Second Language
Acquisition
• Definitions (refer to pages 4 and 5)
Native language (NL)
Target Language (TL)
Second Language Acquisition (SLA)
First Language (L1)
Second Language (L2)
Foreign Language (FL)
Foreing Language Learning (FLL)

37. The Study of Second Language
Acquisition
The Nature of Language
Fundamental to the understanding of the nature
of SLA is an understanding of what it is that
needs to be learned.
1. Sound systems 2. Syntax 3. Morphology and
Lexicon 4. Semantics 5. Pragmatics

38. The Study of Second Language
Acquisition
• The Nature of Language
1. Sound systems
As native speakers of language we know not
only what sounds are possible sounds and what
sounds are not possible sounds. We know what
are possible combinations of sounds and what
sounds are found in what parts of words.

39. The Study of Second Language
Acquisition
• The Nature of Language
2. Syntax
When we talk about syntax we talk about descriptive grammars.
Prescriptive grammar is not related to syntax.
Native speakers of a language know which are possible sentences of
their language and which are not.
Not only do we know which sentences are acceptable in our language,
we also know which sentences are grossly equivalent in terms of
meaning.
Another aspect of language that we know is how meaning is affected
by moving elements in a sentence. For example, adverbs can generally
be moved in a sentence without affecting the meaning, whereas nouns
cannot.
Knowing a language entails knowing a set of rules with which we can
produce an infinite set of sentences.

40. The Study of Second Language
Acquisition
• The Nature of Language
3. Morphology and the Lexicon
Not only do we know how to form words using
affixes but we also know that words can go with
other words.

41. The Study of Second Language
Acquisition
• The Nature of Language
• 4. Semantics
• Knowledge of the semantics of a language
entails knowledge of the reference of words.
For example, in English, we know that a table
refers to an object with a flat top and either
three or four legs.
We also know that the way we combine
elements in sentences affects their meaning.

42. The Study of Second Language
Acquisition
• The Nature of Language
5. Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the way in which we use language
in context. For example, when we answer the
telephone and someone says Is Samuel there?
We know that this is a request to speak with
Samuel.