Theories of First Language Acquisition

Theories of First Language Acquisition

By/ Brwa R. Sharif
5/ May/ 2013

Introduction

The developmental process has been called “mysterious” (Gleitman & Wanner, as cited in Owens, 2012) and “magic” (Bloom, in Owens, 2012). As mature language users, we cannot state all the rules we use; yet, as children, we deciphered and learned these rules within a few years. Few of us can fully explain our own language development; it just seemed to happen. Finally, language-development studies can probe the relationship between language and thought. Language development is parallel to cognitive development. Hopefully, the study of language development may enable language users to understand the underlying mental processes to some degree.
Over the past fifty years, some main theoretical positions have been advanced to explain first language acquisition: behaviorist, innatist, interactional/developmental and other perspectives.
 
1.      The behaviorist perspective: Say what I say

Behaviorism was a theory of learning that was very influential in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in the United States. With regard to language learning, the best-known proponent of this psychological theory was B. F. Skinner. Traditional behaviorists hypothesized that when children imitated the language produced by those around them, their attempts to reproduce what they heard received 'positive reinforcement'. This could take the form of praise or just successful communication. Thus encouraged by their environment, children would continue to imitate and practice these sounds and patterns until they formed 'habits' of correct language use. According to this view, the quality and quantity of the language the child hears, as well as the consistency of the reinforcement offered by others in the environment, would shape the child's language behavior. This theory gives great importance to the environment as the source of everything the child needs to learn. (Lightbown & Spada, 2009)
 
Analyzing children's speech

Let’s have a look at the transcripts from Peter. He was about twenty-four months old when he was recorded as he played with a visiting adult. Using the definitions above, notice how Peter imitates the adult in the following dialogue.
Peter (24 months) is playing with a dump truck while two adults, Patsy and
Lois, look on.
Peter    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.
(Unpublished data from P. M. Lightbown)
If we analysed a larger sample of Peter's speech, we would see that 30-40 percent of his sentences were imitations of what someone else had just said. We would also see that his imitations were not random. That is, he did not simply imitate 30-40 per cent of everything he heard. Detailed analyses of large samples of Peter's speech over about a year showed that he imitated words and sentence structures that were just beginning to appear in his spontaneous speech. Once these new elements became solidly grounded in his language system, he stopped imitating them and went on to imitate others. Unlike a parrot that imitates the familiar and continues to repeat the same things again and again, children appear to imitate selectively. The choice of what to imitate seems to be based on something new that they have just begun to understand and use, nor simply on what is 'available' in the environment.
The sample of speech from Peter seems to lend some support to the behaviorist explanation of language acquisition. Even so, as we saw, the choice of what to imitate and practice seemed determined by something inside the child rather than by the environment.
Children vary in the amount of imitation they do. In addition, many of the things they say show that they are using language creatively, not just repeating what they have heard.
 
Patterns in language

The first example shows a child in the process of learning patterns in language, in this case the rules of word formation, and over generalizing them to new contexts. Randall (36 months) had a sore on his hand.
Mother: Maybe we need to take you to the doctor.
Randall: Why? So he can doc my little bump?
Randall forms the verb 'doc' from the noun 'doctor', by analogy with farmers who farm, swimmers who swim, and actors who act.
 
Question formation

Randall (2 years, 9 months) asked the following questions in various situations over the course of a day.
Are dogs can wiggle their tails?
Are those are my boots?
Are this is hot?
Randall had concluded that the trick of asking questions was to put 'are' at the beginning of the sentence. His questions are good examples of Stage 3 in question development.
 
These examples of children's speech provide us with a window on the process of language learning. Imitation and practice alone cannot explain some of the forms created by the children. They are not merely repetitions of sentences that they have heard from adults. Rather, children appear to pick out patterns and generalize them to new contexts. They create new forms or new uses of words. Their new sentences are usually comprehensible and often correct.
Behaviorism seems to offer a reasonable way of understanding how children learn some of the regular and routine aspects of language, especially at the earliest stages. However, children who do little overt imitation acquire language as fully and rapidly as those who imitate a lot. And although behaviorism goes some way to explaining the sorts of overgeneralization that children make, classical behaviorism is not a satisfactory explanation for the acquisition of the more complex grammar that children acquire. These limitations led researchers to look for different explanations for language acquisition. (Lightbown & Spada, 2009)
 
2.      The innatist perspective: It's all in your mind
 
The Generative or Nativist approach assumes that children are able to acquire language because they are born with innate rules or principles related to structures of human languages (Chomsky, de Villiers, Lenneberg, Wexler, Yang, as cited in Owens, 2012). Generativists assume that it is impossible for children to learn linguistic knowledge from the environment given that the input children hear is limited and full of errors and incomplete information (Chomsky, 1965a, 1965b). Even with these limitations, children are still able to acquire the linguistic knowledge quickly because of the guidance of innate linguistic hypotheses. Something innate or inborn guides a child’s learning.
Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential figures in linguistics, and his ideas about how language is acquired and how it is stored in the mind sparked a revolution in many aspects of linguistics and psychology, including the study of language acquisition. A central part of his thinking is that all human languages are fundamentally innate and that the same universal principles underlie all of them. In his 1959 review of B. F. Skinner's book, (Verbal behavior), Chomsky challenged the behaviorist explanation for language acquisition. He argued 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 at about the same age, and walking is essentially the same in all normal human beings. For Chomsky, language acquisition is very similar. The environment makes on a basic contribution, in this case, the availability of people who speak to the child. The child, or rather, the child's biological endowment, will do the rest.
Consider the following sentences, taken from a book by Lydia White (1989).
Chomsky argued that the behaviorist theory failed to account for 'the logical problem of language acquisition'-the fact that children come to know more about the structure of their language than they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language they hear. The language children are exposed to includes false starts, incomplete sentences, and slips of the tongue, and yet they learn to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.  These English sentences contain the reflexive pronoun 'himself'. Both the pronoun and the noun it refers to {the antecedent) are printed in italics. An asterisk at the beginning of a sentence indicates that the sentence is ungrammatical.
 
John said that Fred liked himself.
*John said that Fred liked himself.
John told Bill to wash himself.
*John told Bill to wash himself.
 
When we look at this kind of complexity, it seems it would be very hard to learn. And yet, most school age children would be able to correctly interpret the grammatical sentences and recognize the ungrammaticality of the others. Researchers who study language acquisition from the innatist perspective argue that such complex grammar could never be learned purely on the basis of imitating and practicing 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. (Lightbown & Spada, 2009)
 
 
 
3.      Interactionist/developmental perspectives: Learning from inside and out
 
In contrast to the Generative approach is the Constructionist or Empiricist approach, which argues that children learn linguistic knowledge from the environmental input to which they are exposed (Christiansen & Charter, Goldberg, MacWhinney, Reali & Christiansen, Tomasello, as cited in Owens, 2012).
Cognitive and developmental psychologists argue that the innatists place too much emphasis on the 'final state' (the competence of adult native speakers) and not enough on the developmental aspects of language acquisition. In their view, language acquisition is but one example of the human child's remarkable 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 the people and objects around them.
Developmental psychologists and psycholinguists have focused on the interplay between the innate learning ability of children and the environment in which they develop. These researchers 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. (Lightbown & Spada, 2009)
 
 
 
4.      Connectionism

Another recent view of language acquisition comes from CONNECTIONISM. Connectionists differ sharply from the Chomskyan innatists because they hypothesize that language acquisition does not require a separate 'module of the mind but can be explained in terms of learning in general. Furthermore, connectionists argue that what children need to know is essentially available to them in the language they are exposed to. Some of the research has involved computer simulations in which language samples are provided as input to a fairly simple program. The goal is to show that the computer program can 'learn' certain things if it is exposed to them enough. The program can even generalize beyond what it has actually been exposed to and make the same kinds of creative 'mistakes' that children make, such as putting a regular -ed ending on an irregular verb, for example, eated.
 
Researchers such as Jeffrey Elman and his colleagues (1996) explain language acquisition in terms of how children acquire links or 'connections' between words and phrases and the situations in which they occur. They claim that when children hear a word or phrase in the context of a specific object, event, or person, an association is created in the child’s mind between the word or phrase and what it represents. Thus, hearing a word brings to mind the object, and seeing the object brings to mind the word or phrase. Eventually any of the characteristics of the object or event may trigger the retrieval the associated word or phrase from memory. For example, a child may first recognize the word 'cat' only in reference to the family pet and only when the cat is meowing beside the kitchen door. As the word is heard in more contexts-picture books, furry toys, someone else's cat-the child recognizes and uses the word as the label for all these cats. However, at a later point, the word may be generalized to other furry creatures as well, indicating that connections have been made to characteristics of the cat and not to an entity that adults know as 'cat'. Then there is another learning process involved in 'pruning' the connections so that 'cat' applies only to felines-at least until more metaphorical meanings are learned later in life.
In a connectionist model, language acquisition is not just a process of associating words with elements of external reality. It is also a process of associating words and phrases with the other words and phrases that occur with them, or words with grammatical morphemes that occur with them. For example, children learning languages in which nouns have grammatical gender learn to associate the appropriate article and adjective forms with nouns. Similarly, they learn to associate pronouns with the verb forms that mark person and number. They learn which temporal adverbs go with which verb tenses. According to connectionist theory, all this is possible because of the child's general ability to develop associations between things that occur together.
Of particular importance to the connectionist hypothesis is the fact that children are exposed to many thousands of opportunities to learn words and phrases. Learning rakes place gradually, as the number of links between language and meaning are built up. They argue that acquisition of language, while remarkable, is not the only remarkable feat accomplished by the child. They compare it to other cognitive and perceptual learning, including learning to 'see'. (Lightbown & Spada, 2009)
 
 
5.      Other Theories

Other relevant theories about language development include Piaget's theory of congnitive development,  which considers the development of language as a continuation of general cognitive development (Clibbens, 1993) and Vygotsky's social theories that attribute the development of language to an individual's social interactions and growth, and he viewed social interaction as essential for the development of individual functioning (Schneider & Watkins, 1996).
 
a.      Piaget

One of the earliest proponents of the view that children's language is built on their cognitive development was the Swiss psychologist/epistemologist, Jean Piaget (1951/1946). In the early decades of the twentieth 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. It is easy to see from this how children’s cognitive development would partly determine how they use language. For example the use of certain terms such as ‘bigger’ or ‘more’ depend 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. For Piaget, language was one of a number of symbol systems that are develop in childhood. Language can be used to represent knowledge that children have acquired through physical interaction with the environment. (Lightbown & Spada, 2009)
 
b.      Lev Vygotsky

He was a psychologist, and another influential student of child development. He observed interactions among children and also between children and adults in schools in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. He concluded that language develops primarily from social interaction. He argued that in a supportive interactive environment. Children are able to advance to a higher level of knowledge and performance. He referred to this metaphorical place in which the children could do more than they would be capable of independently as the zone of proximal development (ZOD). Vygotsky’s view differs from Piaget’s. Piaget saw language as a symbol system that could be used to express knowledge acquired through interaction with the physical world. For Vygotsky thought was essentially internalized speech, and speech emerged in social interaction. (Lightbown & Spada, 2009)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
References

• Clibbens, J. (1993). From theory to practice in child language development. Down Syndrome Research and Practice, 1(3), 101-106.
• Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (2009). How languages are learned (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Owens, R. E. (2012). Language development: An introduction (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education.
• Schneider, P., & Watkins, R. V. (1996). Applying Vygotskian developmental theory to language intervention. LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND HEARING SERVICES IN SCHOOLS, 27, 157-170.