This presentation will help you to get deeper understanding on how language is learned from 3 different perspectives, those are behaviorist, innatist, and interactionist. In this presetation you will also learn about language acquisition device (LAD).

1. LEARNING A FIRST LANGUAGE

2. How is language learned?
 The behaviorist
 The innatist
 The interactionist

3. Behaviourist
 Skinner : language behavior is the production of correct responses to stimull through
reinforcement.
 Traditional behaviourist believed that language learning is simply a matter of imitation,
practice and habit formation.
 Children imitate sounds and patterns which they hear around them and receive positive
reinforcement (praise) for doing so.
 The quality and the quantity of the language which the child hears, as well as the consistency
of the reinforcement offered by others in the environment, should have an effect on the
child’s success in language learning.
 The behaviorist view of how language is learned has an intuitive appeal (without formal
teaching)
 The behaviourist view imitation and practice as a primary processes in language
development.

4. Behaviourist
(Peter is playing with a dump truck while 2 adults look on)
Peter : (finding a car) Get more.
Lois : You’re gonna put more wheels in the dump truck!
Peter : Dump truck. Wheels. Dump truck.
(later)
Patsy : What happened to it (the truck)?
Peter : (looking under chair for it) Lose it. Dump truck!
Dump truck! Fall! Fall!
Lois : Yes, the dump truck fell down.
Peter : Dump truck fell down. Dump truck.

5. Behaviourist
(Peter, Patsy and Lois are playing with pencil and paper.)
Peter : (indicating he wants Patsy to draw) Lois too. Patsy. Lois
too!
Patsy : You want me to make a car? OK.
(Patsy draws a tiny car like Lois’s.)
Patsy : Oh, you want Lois to have some paper?
Peter : Lois have some paper?
(later)
Patsy : Lets see if I can draw what you draw. Draw something!
Peter : Draw something!

6. Behaviourist
From these examples, we could see that child’s
imitations are not random. Children doesn’t imitate
everything they hears. Children’s imitation is
selective and based on what they are currently
learning. So, even the child imitates, the choice of
what to imitate seems to be based on something the
child already knows, not simply on what is available
in the environment.

7. Behaviourist
Cindy (25 months)
Cindy: (Playing with several dolls, one of which she calls a ‘tiger’) Doll go to
sleep.
Patsy : does the doll want to go to sleep?
Cindy : (not answering Patsy, but talking to dolls in ‘motherly’ tones) Okay, I
take you. Come on, Doll. Go to sleep with the tiger. Go to sleep. Dolls want to
go to sleep.
Patsy : Does the tiger want to go to sleep?
Cindy : Tiger wants to go to sleep. The doll want to go to sleep. He go to sleep

8. Behaviourist
Kathryn(24 months)
Lois : Did you see the toys I brought?
Kathryn : I bring toys? Choo choo? Lois brought the choo choo train?
Lois : Yes, Lois brought the choo choo train.
Kathryn : (reaching for bag) I want pay with choo choo train. I want
play with choo choo train. (taking out slide) Want play. What’s this?
Lois : Oh you know what that is.
Kathryn : Put down on floor. This. I do this.

9. Behaviourist
From these examples, we could see that the child
practices new structures in a way that sometimes make
her sound like a student in a foreign language classroom.
The child says “Tiger wants to go to sleep. The doll wants
to go to sleep. He go to sleep”. It’s called substitution
drill. The child tries to practice it by substituting the
subject. But, not all children practice to extent that
Cindy does in this example.
From the second example, we see that the child
sometimes repeats herself but rarely imitates the other
speaker. Instead, she answers question or poses them.
She also elaborates on the speaker’s questions or
statements.

10. Behaviorist
Imitation and practice alone cannot explain such errors since the
forms created by the child were never produced by adults. Rather,
children appear to pick out patterns and the generalize them to new
context. They create new forms or new uses of words until they finally
figure out how the forms are used by adults.

11. Innatist
 Main figure : Noam Chomsky
 The linguist Noam Chomsky claims that children are biologically
programmed for language and that language develops in the child in the
same way that other biological functions develop.
 Children are born with special ability to discover themselves the
underlying rules of a language system. This special ability is referred to
as a Language Acquisition Device (LAD).

12. Innatist
 Chomsky (1959) argues that behaviorism
cannot provide sufficient explanations for
children’s language acquisition for the
following reasons:

13. Innatist
 The language the child is exposed to in the environment is full of confusing
information does not provide all the information which the child needs.
 Children are by no means systematically corrected or instructed on language
by parents.
 When parents correct, they tend to focus on meaning rather than form, and
children often ignore the correction and continue to use their ownways of
saying things.

14. Innatist: LAD & UG
 Chomsky theorized that children were born with a hard-wired Language
Acquisition Device(LAD) in their brains.
 LAD is a set of language learning tools, intuitive at birth in all children.
 For the LAD to work, children need access only to samples of a natural
language, which serves as a trigger to activate the device.
 He later expanded this idea into that of universal grammar, a set of innate
principles and adjustable parameters that are common to all human languages.
 Once the LAD is activated, children are able to discover the structure of
language to be learned by matching the innate knowledge of basic grammatical
principles (UG) to the structure of the particular language in the environment.

15. Innatist
 Evidence used to support Chomsky’s innatist position:
1. Virtually all children successfully learn their native language at a time in life
when they would not be expected to learn anything else so complicated (i.e.
biologically programmed).
2. Language is separate from other aspects of cognitive developments (e.g.,
creativity and social grace) and may be located in a different “module" of the
brain.

16. Innatist
3. The language children are exposed to does not contain examples of all the
linguistic rules and patterns.
4. Animals cannot learn to manipulate a symbol system as complicated as the
natural language of a 3- or 4-year-old child.
5. Children acquire grammatical rules without getting explicit instruction.

17. The biological basis for the innatist position:
The Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) –Lenneberg:
 Lennerberg observed that this ability to develop normal behaviours and
knowledge in a variety environment does not continue indefinitely and that children
who have never learned language ( because of deafness or extreme isolation) cannot
return to normal if there deprivations go on for too long.
 There is a specific and limited time period (i.e., “critical period”) for the LAD to
work successfully.
 There are two strong version of CPH. The strong version is that children must
acquire their first language by puberty or they will never be able to learn from
subsequent exposure. The weak version is that language learning will be more difficult
and incomplete after puberty.

18. Innatist
 2 cases studies of abnormal language development – evidence of the CPH :
1. Genie – a girl of 13 years old (1970)
The most well-documented case of a language-deprived child was that of Genie. Before discovery, Genie
had lived strapped and harnessed into a chair. Genie was discovered in 1971 in the family home, had been
almost completely isolated, deprived, neglected and abuse since the age of 20months, she recognized as highly
abnormal. Genie was unsocialized, primitive and undevelop phisically, emotionally. Needles to say, Genie had
no language.
A social welfare agency took her into custody and admitted Genie into a hospital. After a brief period in
rehabilitation centre, Genie lived in a normal live, loving foster home and attended special school.

19. Innatist
 cases studies of abnormal language development – evidence of the CPH :
2. Victor – a boy of about 12 years old (1799)
In 1799 a 12-years-old boy was found wandering naked in the woods of
Ayeyron, France. Upon capture, he was found to be completely wild, apparently
having no contact with humankind.
Victor was given to Dr. Itard, who "experimented" on the child. Although
Dr. Itard succeeded to some extent in developing Victor’s sociability, memory,
judgement and all the function of his sense, Victor remained unreceptive to all
sounds other than those which has meaning for him in the forest.
Victor never used the word to communicate his need. Finally, Dr. Itard give
up.

20. Interactionist
 Piaget: Language is dependentupon and springs from cognitive development.
That is children’s cognitive development determines their language
development
 He argued that the developing cognitive understanding is built on the
interaction between the child and the things which can be observed, touched,
and manipulated.
 For him, language was one of a number of symbol systems developed in
childhood, rather than a separate module of the mind. Language can be used
to represent knowledge that children have acquired through physical
interaction with the environment.

21. Interactionist
 The interactionist position is that language develops as a result of the
complex interplay between uniquely human characteristics of the child and
the environment in which child develops.
 The interactionists claim that language is modified to suit the capability of
the leraner is a crucial element in the language acquisition process.
 Interactionist explanations are necessary for understanding how children
relate form and meaning in language, how they interact in conversations, and
how they use language appropriately.

22. Interactionist
 Caretaker talk: the way adults modify the way they speak
when addressing little children.
 Caretaker involves a slower rate of speech, higher pitch,
more varied intonation, shorter, simpler sentence
patterns, frequent repetition, and paraphrase.
 The evidence suggests that children whose parents do not
consistently provide such modified interaction will still
learn language, but these children may have access to the
modified speech when they are in the company of older
siblings or other adults.
 To the interactionist, what is important is the
conversational give-and-take in which the adult
intuitively responds to the clues the child provides as to
the level of language he or she is capable in processing.