Module 12 : Brain Anatomy

Picture of the Brain

Human Anatomy
By Matthew Hoffman, MD
Reviewed by Carol DerSarkissian on May 18, 2019

© 2014 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved.

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The brain is one of the largest and most complex organs in the human body.
It is made up of more than 100 billion nerves that communicate in trillions of connections
called synapses.

The brain is made up of many specialized areas that work together:

• The cortex is the outermost layer of brain cells. Thinking and voluntary movements begin in
the cortex.
• The brain stem is between the spinal cord and the rest of the brain. Basic functions like
breathing and sleep are controlled here.
• The basal ganglia are a cluster of structures in the center of the brain. The basal ganglia
coordinate messages between multiple other brain areas.
• The cerebellum is at the base and the back of the brain. The cerebellum is responsible for
coordination and balance.

The brain is also divided into several lobes:

• The frontal lobes are responsible for problem solving and judgment and motor function.

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• The parietal lobes manage sensation, handwriting, and body position.
• The temporal lobes are involved with memory and hearing.
• The occipital lobes contain the brain's visual processing system.
The brain is surrounded by a layer of tissue called the meninges. The skull (cranium) helps
protect the brain from injury.

Brain Conditions
• Headache: There are many types of headaches; some can be serious but most are
not and are generally treated with analgesics/painkillers.
• Stroke (brain infarction): Blood flow and oxygen are suddenly interrupted to an area
of brain tissue, which then dies. A blood clot, or bleeding in the brain, are the cause
of most strokes.
• Brain aneurysm: An artery in the brain develops a weak area that swells, balloon-like.
A brain aneurysm rupture can causes a stroke.
• Subdural hematoma: Bleeding within or under the dura, the lining inside of the skull.
A subdural hematoma may exert pressure on the brain, causing neurological
problems.
• Epidural hematoma: Bleeding between the tough tissue (dura) lining the inside of the
skull and the skull itself, usually shortly after a head injury. Initial mild symptoms can
progress rapidly to unconsciousness and death, if untreated.
• Intracerebral hemorrhage: Any bleeding inside the brain.
• Concussion: A brain injury that causes a temporary disturbance in brain function.
Traumatic head injuries cause most concussions.
• Cerebral edema: Swelling of the brain tissue in response to injury or electrolyte
imbalances.
• Brain tumor: Any abnormal tissue growth inside the brain. Whether malignant
(cancer) or benign, brain tumors usually cause problems by the pressure they exert
on the normal brain.
• Glioblastoma: An aggressive, malignant brain tumor (cancer). Brain glioblastomas
progress rapidly and are very difficult to cure.
• Hydrocephalus: An abnormally increased amount of cerebrospinal (brain) fluid inside
the skull. Usually this is because the fluid is not circulating properly.
• Normal pressure hydrocephalus: A form of hydrocephalus that often causes problems
walking, along with dementia and urinary incontinence. Pressures inside the brain
remain normal, despite the increased fluid.
• Meningitis: Inflammation of the lining around the brain or spinal cord, usually from
infection. Stiff neck, neck pain, headache, fever, and sleepiness are common
symptoms.
• Encephalitis: Inflammation of the brain tissue, usually from infection with a virus. Fever,
headache, and confusion are common symptoms.
• Traumatic brain injury: Permanent brain damage from a traumatic head injury.
Obvious mental impairment, or more subtle personality and mood changes can
occur.
• Parkinson's disease: Nerves in a central area of the brain degenerate slowly, causing
problems with movement and coordination. A tremor of the hands is a common early
sign.
• Huntington's disease: An inherited nerve disorder that affects the brain. Dementia
and difficulty controlling movements (chorea) are its symptoms.

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 • Epilepsy: The tendency to have seizures. Head injuries and strokes may cause
epilepsy, but usually no cause is identified.
• Dementia: A decline in cognitive function resulting from death or malfunction of
nerve cells in the brain. Conditions in which nerves in the brain degenerate, as well as
alcohol abuse and strokes, can cause dementia.
• Alzheimer’s disease: For unclear reasons, nerves in certain brain areas degenerate,
causing progressive dementia. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of
dementia.
• Brain abscess: A pocket of infection in the brain, usually by bacteria. Antibiotics and
surgical drainage of the area are often necessary.

Brain Tests
• Computed tomography (CT scan): A scanner takes multiple X-rays, which a
computer converts into detailed images of the brain and skull.
• Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI scan): Using radio waves in a magnetic field, an
MRI scanner creates highly detailed images of the brain and other parts of the head.
• Angiography (brain angiogram): A special substance doctors call "a contrast agent"
is injected into the veins, and travels into the brain. X-ray videos of the brain are taken,
which can show problems in the brain's arteries.
• Magnetic resonance angiography (MRA): A special MRI scan of the brain's arteries.
An MRA scan may show a blood clot or another cause for stroke.
• Lumbar puncture (spinal tap): A needle is inserted into the space around the spinal
nerves, and fluid is removed for analysis. Lumbar puncture is often done if meningitis
is suspected.
• Electroencephalogram (EEG): Brain activity is monitored through electrodes placed
on the skin on the head. EEG can help diagnose seizures, or other brain problems.
• Neurocognitive testing: Tests of problem-solving ability, short-term memory, and other
complex brain functions. Usually, neurocognitive testing is done through
questionnaires.
• Brain biopsy: In rare situations, a very small piece of the brain is needed to make the
diagnosis of a brain condition. Brain biopsies are generally done only when the
information is needed to provide proper treatment.

Brain Treatments
• Thrombolytics: Clot-busting medicines injected into the veins can improve or cure
some strokes if given within a few hours after symptoms start.
• Antiplatelet agents: Medicines like aspirin and clopidogrel (Plavix) help prevent blood
clots. This can reduce the chance of a stroke.
• Cholinesterase inhibitors: These medicines can improve brain function slightly in mild
or moderate Alzheimer’s disease. They do not slow or prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
• Antibiotics: When a brain infection is caused by bacteria, antibiotics can kill the
organisms and make a cure more likely.
• Levodopa: A medicine that increases brain levels of dopamine, which is helpful in
controlling symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
• Brain surgery: An operation on the brain can cure some brain tumors. Brain surgery
may be performed any time increased pressure in the brain threatens brain tissue.
• Ventriculostomy: A drain is placed into the natural spaces inside the brain (ventricles).
Ventriculostomy is usually performed to relieve high brain pressures.

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 • Craniotomy: A surgeon drills a hole into the side of the skull to relieve high pressures.
• Lumbar drain: A drain is placed into the fluid around the spinal cord. This can relieve
pressure on the brain and spinal cord.
• Radiation therapy: If cancer affects the brain, radiation can reduce symptoms and
slow the cancer's growth.

Module 13 : Stages of Language Acquisition

There are four main stages of normal language acquisition: The babbling stage,
the Holophrastic or one-word stage, the two-word stage and the Telegraphic stage.
These stages can be broken down even more into these smaller stages: pre-production,
early production, speech emergent, beginning fluency intermediate fluency and
advanced fluency. On this page I will be providing a summary of the four major stage of
language acquisition.

Babbling

Within a few weeks of being born the baby begins to recognize it’s mothers’ voice.
There are two sub-stages within this period. The first occurs between birth – 8 months. Most
of this stage involves the baby relating to its surroundings and only during 5/6 – 8 month
period does the baby begin using it’s vocals. As has been previously discussed babies
learn by imitation and the babbling stage is just that. During these months the baby hears
sounds around them and tries to reproduce them, albeit with limited success. The babies
attempts at creating and experimenting with sounds is what we call babbling.

When the baby has been babbling for a few months it begins to relate the words
or sounds it is making to objects or things. This is the second sub-stage. From 8 months to
12 months the baby gains more and more control over not only it’s vocal communication
but physical communication as well, for example body language and gesturing.
Eventually when the baby uses both verbal and non-verbal means to communicate, only
then does it move on to the next stage of language acquisition.

Holophrastic / One-word stage

The second stage of language acquisition is the holophrastic or one word stage.
This stage is characterized by one word sentences. In this stage nouns make up around
50% of the infants vocabulary while verbs and modifiers make up around 30% and
questions and negatives make up the rest. This one-word stage contains single word
utterances such as “play” for “I want to play now”. Infants use these sentence primarily
to obtain things they want or need, but sometimes they aren’t that obvious.

For example a baby may cry or say “mama” when it purely wants attention. The
infant is ready to advance to the next stage when it can speak in successive one word
sentences.

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Two-Word Stage

The two word stage (as you may have guessed) is made of up primarily two word
sentences. These sentences contain 1 word for the predicate and 1 word for the subject.
For example “Doggie walk” for the sentence “The dog is being walked.” During this stage
we see the appearance of single modifiers e.g. “That dog”, two word questions e.g.
“Mummy eat?” and the addition of the suffix –ing onto words to describe something that
is currently happening e.g. “Baby Sleeping.”

Telegraphic Stage

The final stage of language acquisition is the telegraphic stage. This stage is
named as it is because it is similar to what is seen in a telegram; containing just enough
information for the sentence to make sense. This stage contains many three and four
word sentences. Sometime during this stage the child begins to see the links between
words and objects and therefore overgeneralization comes in.

Some examples of sentences in the telegraphic stage are “Mummy eat carrot”,
“What her name?” and “He is playing ball.” During this stage a child’s vocabulary
expands from 50 words to up to 13,000 words. At the end of this stage the child starts to
incorporate plurals, joining words and attempts to get a grip on tenses.

As a child’s grasp on language grows it may seem to us as though they just learn
each part in a random order, but this is not the case. There is a definite order of speech
sounds. Children first start speaking vowels, starting with the rounded mouthed sounds
like “oo” and “aa”. After the vowels come the consonants, p, b, m, t, d, n, k and g. The
consonants are first because they are easier to pronounce then some of the others, for
example ‘s’ and ‘z’ require specific tongue place which children cannot do at that age.

As all human beings do, children will improvise something they cannot yet do. For
example when children come across a sound they cannot produce they replace it with
a sound they can e.g. ‘Thoap” for “Soap” and “Wun” for “Run.” These are just a few
example of resourceful children are, even if in our eyes it is just cute.

Module 14 : Stages of Language Development: Pre-Linguistic

and Symbolic Language
How does language expression emerge in children? Learn about the
development of syntax in children through the pre-linguistic and linguistic stages of
language development in this lesson.

Introduction to Syntax

What image do you have in your mind when I say the following words: Venetian
blind? You picture a common window covering, right? Now what happens to that image
when I switch up the order of the words: blind Venetian? It creates a completely different

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idea, doesn't it? As this example shows, the order in which we use words can be very
important! The term that refers to the order or sequencing of words in a language is
syntax.

Studies show that syntax is learned as young children are exposed to speech with
proper, complex sentence structure. So, how does this process take place? Before babies
say their first word, they have made a lot of progress towards understanding language
and speech. A young child listens and attempts to imitate the sounds it hears. In turn, we
respond to and reinforce these attempts at speech. A young child does not develop this
ability all at one time. Instead, the process consists of a series of developmental stages.
These stages are typically divided into two categories: pre-linguistic and linguistic.

Pre-Linguistic Language Development

Pre-linguistic language development is when a child is learning to control the

sounds he can produce and to string these sounds together in vocal play. In this stage,
the child is not yet able to manipulate these sounds into proper words.

There are four categories of pre-linguistic development that can be distinguished.

Vegetative sounds occur at 0-2 months of age and include the natural sounds that
babies make, such as burping or crying. Cooing and laughter occur at 2-5 months of
age. These are vocalizations that the baby makes when it's happy or content and can
be made up of vowel or consonant sounds. Vocal play begins around the ages of 4-8
months. During vocal play, the baby begins to string together longer vowel or consonant
sounds. Finally, babbling occurs around the ages of 6-13 months. At this time, the child
begins to produce a series of consonant-vowel syllables and may develop utterances,
such as ma-ma and da-da.

Linguistic Language Development

Linguistic language development is the stage of language development signaled

by the emergence of words and symbolic communication. Prior to this stage, most of the
sounds a child produces are no more than the practice of sound manipulation and
sound sequencing in order to gain the motor skills necessary to create words. There are
six periods of linguistic language development.

Before a child masters the ability to form words, they will first begin to use specific
sound combinations consistently with specific meaning. This is the early one word period
that begins around 12-19 months of age. An example of this would be a child saying
'baba' every time he wants a bottle of milk. Even though this is not the exact same as the
word bottle, the child is using 'baba' in the same manner as you would use the word
'bottle.'

The later one word period begins around 14-24 months of age. In this stage, the
words used by the child are readily identifiable, and he begins to name and label people
and objects in his environment. A child's typical vocabulary during this period will consist
of words like 'dog,' 'go,' 'daddy' and 'bye-bye.'

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 Next comes the two word period of language development. As the name implies,
this is when he will begin to combine two words together to make simple phrases, such
as 'mommy go' or 'shoe on.' The two word period typically begins from 20-30 months of
age.

The three word period begins around the ages of 28-42 months of age. During this
period, a child adds at least one more word to their phrases and begins to use pronouns.
They may also begin to use articles and simple prepositions. Examples would be 'me go
daddy,' 'you on chair' or 'he kick a ball.'

At around 34-48 months of age, the four word period begins. At this time, the child
will begin to use combinations of four to six words. They will use more prepositions, and
adjectives begin to appear in speech. Examples would be 'Suzy has a little dog' or 'I sleep
on the top bunk.'

The last period of linguistic language development is the complex utterance

period. It begins around the ages of 48-60 months. At this time, a child regularly produces
phrases longer than six words in length, and they begin to express concepts of past and
future time. Examples are 'Daddy comes home from the trip tomorrow' and 'I saw a dog
at the park yesterday.' They may also begin to use contractions, such as 'can't' or 'don't.'
Researchers do not agree on when this period is completed and adult sentence structure
is achieved. Opinions range from 5 years of age to 12 years of age.

Expressive vs. Receptive Language

This lesson on language development has focused on the progression of syntax

and the increased ability to communicate through speech. This is considered expressive
language. There's also the development of receptive language to consider.

Receptive language refers to speech comprehension or the ability to understand

what is being said. Receptive and expressive language develops separately of one
another, but there is some parallel development of note between them. A child must be
able to understand at least at the same level that they can express themselves. Typically,
a child will actually always understand more than they can express, although the degree
to which this occurs varies greatly from one child to the next.

Lesson Summary

The order or sequencing of words in a language is called syntax. Language

development focused on the progression of syntax and the increased ability to
communicate through speech is considered expressive language. Speech
comprehension, or the ability to understand what is being said, develops separately and
is called receptive language. A child must be able to understand at least as much as
they can communicate their needs. This varies from child to child, but they will typically
always understand more than they can express.

Pre-linguistic language development is when a child is learning to control the

sounds it can produce and string these sounds together in vocal play. In this stage, the

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child is not yet able to manipulate these sounds into proper words. Pre-linguistic language
development can be divided into four categories: vegetative sounds, cooing and
laughter, vocal play and babbling.

Linguistic language development is the stage of language development signaled

by the emergence of words and symbolic communication. Linguistic language
development can be divided into six categories: early one word, later one word, two
word, three word, four word and complex utterance.

Module 15 : THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Over the last fifty years, several theories have been put forward to explain the
process by which children learn to understand and speak a language. They can be
summarised as follows:

Theory Central Idea Individual with theory

Behaviourist Children imitate adults. Skinner
Their correct utterances
are reinforced when they
get what they want or are
praised.

Innateness A child's brain contains Chomsky

special language-learning
mechanisms at birth.

Cognitive Language is just one Piaget

aspect of a child's overall
intellectual development.

Interaction This theory emphasises the Bruner

interaction between
children and their care-
givers.

We shall consider each of these in turn. Before we do, it is important to recognise

that they should not be seen simply as conflicting theories, replacing each other in a
sequence. Although Behaviourism is
now seen as offering only a very limited explanation, each theory has added to
our overall understanding, placing emphasis on different aspects of the process.

Behaviourism
The behaviourist psychologists developed their theories while carrying out a series
of experiments on animals. They observed that rats or birds, for example, could be taught
to perform various tasks by encouraging habit-forming. Researchers rewarded desirable

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behaviour. This was known as positive reinforcement. Undesirable behaviour was
punished or simply not rewarded – negative reinforcement. The behaviourist B. F. Skinner
then proposed this theory as an explanation for language acquisition in humans. In
Verbal Behaviour (1957), he stated:

"The basic processes and relations which give verbal behaviour its special
characteristics are now fairly well understood. Much of the experimental work responsible
for this advance has been carried out on other species, but the results have proved to
be surprisingly free of species restrictions. Recent work has shown that the methods can
be extended to human behaviour without serious modifications." (cited in Lowe and
Graham, 1998, p68)

Skinner suggested that a child imitates the language of its parents or carers.
Successful attempts are rewarded because an adult who recognises a word spoken by
a child will praise the child and/or give it what it is asking for. Successful utterances are
therefore reinforced while unsuccessful ones are forgotten.

Limitations of Behaviourism

While there must be some truth in Skinner's explanation, there are many objections
to it. Language is based on a set of structures or rules, which could not be worked out
simply by imitating individual utterances. The mistakes made by children reveal that they
are not simply imitating but actively working out and applying rules.

For example, a child who says "drinked" instead of "drank" is not copying an adult
but rather over-applying a rule. The child has discovered that past tense verbs are formed
by adding a /d/ or /t/ sound to the base form. The "mistakes" occur because there are
irregular verbs which do not behave in this way. Such forms are often referred to as
intelligent mistakes or virtuous errors.

2 The vast majority of children go through the same stages of language

acquisition. There appears to be a definite sequence of steps. We refer to developmental
milestones. Apart from certain extreme cases (see the case of Genie), the sequence
seems to be largely unaffected by the treatment the child receives or the type of society
in which s/he grows up.
Children are often unable to repeat what an adult says, especially if the adult
utterance contains a structure the child has not yet started to use. The classic
demonstration comes from the American psycholinguist David McNeill. The structure in
question here involves negating verbs:

Child: Nobody don't like me

Mother: No, say, "Nobody likes me."
Child: Nobody don't like me.
(Eight repetitions of this dialogue)
Mother: No, now listen carefully: say, "Nobody likes me."
Child: Oh! Nobody don't likes me.
(McNeil in The Genesis of Language, 1966)

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 Few children receive much explicit grammatical correction. Parents are more
interested in politeness and truthfulness. According to Brown, Cazden and Bellugi (1969):
"It seems to be truth value rather than well-formed syntax that chiefly governs explicit
verbal reinforcement by parents - which renders mildly paradoxical the fact that the
usual product of such a training schedule is an adult whose speech is highly grammatical
but not notably truthful." (cited in Lowe and Graham, 1998)

There is evidence for a critical period for language acquisition. Children who
have not acquired language by the age of about seven will never entirely catch up. The
most famous example is that of Genie, discovered in 1970 at the age of 13. She had been
severely neglected brought up in isolation and deprived of normal human contact. Of
course, she was disturbed and underdeveloped in many ways. During subsequent
attempts at rehabilitation, her careers tried to teach her to speak. Despite some success,
mainly in learning vocabulary, she never became a fluent speaker, failing to acquire the
grammatical competence of the average five-year-old.

Innateness

Noam Chomsky published a criticism of the behaviourist theory in 1957. In addition

to some of the arguments listed above, he focused particularly on the impoverished
language input children receive. Adults do not typically speak in grammatically
complete sentences. In addition, what the child hears is only a small sample of language.

Chomsky concluded that children must have an inborn faculty for language
acquisition. According to this theory, the process is biologically determined - the human
species has evolved a brain whose neural circuits contain linguistic information at birth.
The child's natural predisposition to learn language is triggered by hearing speech and
the child's brain is able to interpret what s/he hears according to the underlying principles
or structures it already contains. This natural faculty has become known as the Language
Acquisition Device (LAD). Chomsky did not suggest that an English child is born knowing
anything specific about English, of course. He stated that all human languages share
common principles. (For example, they all have words for things and actions - nouns and
verbs.) It is the child's task to establish how the specific language s/he hears expresses
these underlying principles.

For example, the LAD already contains the concept of verb tense. By listening to
such forms as "worked", "played" and "patted", the child will form the hypothesis that the
past tense of verbs is formed by adding the sound /d/, /t/ or /id/ to the base form. This, in
turn, will lead to the "virtuous errors" mentioned above. It hardly needs saying that the
process is unconscious. Chomsky does not envisage the small child lying in its cot working
out grammatical rules consciously!

3 Chomsky's ground-breaking theory remains at the centre of the debate about

language acquisition.However, it has been modified, both by Chomsky himself and by
others. Chomsky's original position was that the LAD contained specific knowledge about
language. Dan Isaac Slobin has proposed that it may be more like a mechanism for
working out the rules of language:

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 "It seems to me that the child is born not with a set of linguistic categories but with
some sort of process mechanism - a set of procedures and inference rules, if you will -
that he uses to process linguistic data. These mechanisms are such that, applying them
to the input data, the child ends up with something which is a member of the class of
human languages. The linguistic universals, then, are the result of an innate cognitive
competence rather than the content of such a competence." (cited in Russell, 2001)

Evidence to support the innateness theory. Work in several areas of language

study has provided support for the idea of an innate language faculty.

Three types of evidence are offered here:

1. Slobin has pointed out that human anatomy is peculiarly adapted to the
production of speech. Unlike our nearest relatives, the great apes, we have evolved a
vocal tract which allows the precise articulation of a wide repertoire of vocal sounds.
Neuro-science has also identified specific areas of the brain with distinctly linguistic
functions, notably Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Stroke victims provide valuable
data: depending on the site of brain damage, they may suffer a range of language
dysfunction, from problems with finding words to an inability to interpret syntax.
Experiments aimed at teaching chimpanzees to communicate using plastic symbols or
manual gestures have proved controversial. It seems likely that our ape cousins, while
able to learn individual "words", have little or no grammatical competence. Pinker (1994)
offers a good account of this research.

2. The formation of creole varieties of English appears to be the result of the LAD
at work. The linguist Derek Bickerton has studied the formation of Dutch-based creoles in
Surinam. Escaped slaves, living together but originally from different language groups,
were forced to communicate in their very limited Dutch. The result was the restricted form
of language known as a pidgin. The adult speakers were past the critical age at which
they could learn a new language fluently - they had learned Dutch as a foreign
language and under unfavourable conditions. Remarkably, the children of these slaves
turned the pidgin into a full language, known by linguists as a creole. They were
presumably unaware of the process but the outcome was a language variety which
follows its own consistent rules and has a full expressive range. Creoles based on English
are also found, in the Caribbean and elsewhere.

3. Studies of the sign languages used by the deaf have shown that, far from being
crude gestures replacing spoken words, these are complex, fully grammatical languages
in their own right. A sign language may exist in several dialects. Children learning to sign
as a first language pass through similar stages to hearing children learning spoken
language. Deprived of speech, the urge to communicate is realised through a manual
system which fulfils the same function. There is even a signing creole, again developed
by children, in Nicaragua. For an account of this, see Pinker, 1994 (pp 36-7).(Note: some
of this section is derived from the BBC television documentary The Mind Machine.)

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Limitations of Chomsky's theory

Chomsky's work on language was theoretical. He was interested in grammar and

much of his work consists of complex explanations of grammatical rules. He did not study
real children. The theory relies on children being exposed to language but takes no
account of the interaction between children and their carers. Nor does it recognise the
reasons why a child might want to speak, the functions of language.

4 In 1977, Bard and Sachs published a study of a child known as Jim, the hearing
son of deaf parents. Jim's parents wanted their son to learn speech rather than the sign
language they used between themselves. He watched a lot of television and listened to
the radio, therefore receiving frequent language input. However, his progress was limited
until a speech therapist was enlisted to work with him. Simply being exposed to language
was not enough. Without the associated interaction, it meant little to him. Subsequent
theories have placed greater emphasis on the ways in which real children develop
language to fulfil their needs and interact with their environment, including other people.

The Cognitive Theory

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget placed acquisition of language within the
context of a child's mental or cognitive development. He argued that a child has to
understand a concept before s/he can acquire the particular language form which
expresses that concept. A good example of this is seriation. There will be a point in a
child's intellectual development when s/he can compare objects with respect to size.
This means that if you gave the child a number of sticks, s/he could arrange them in order
of size. Piaget suggested that a child who had not yet reached this stage would not be
able to learn and use comparative adjectives like "bigger" or "smaller".

Object permanence is another phenomenon often cited in relation to the

cognitive theory. During the first year of life, children seem unaware of the existence of
objects they cannot see. An object which moves out of sight ceases to exist. By the time
they reach the age of 18 months, children have realized that objects have an existence
independently of their perception. The cognitive theory draws attention to the large
increase in children's vocabulary at around this age, suggesting a link between object
permanence and the learning of labels for objects.

Limitations of the Cognitive Theory

During the first year to 18 months, connections of the type explained above are
possible to trace but, as a child continues to develop, so it becomes harder to find clear
links between language and intellect. Some studies have focused on children who have
learned to speak fluently despite abnormal mental development. Syntax in particular
does not appear to rely on general intellectual growth.

Input or Interactionist Theories

In contrast to the work of Chomsky, more recent theorists have stressed the
importance of the language input children receive from their care-givers. Language
exists for the purpose of communication and can only be learned in the context of

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interaction with people who want to communicate with you. Interactionists such as
Jerome Bruner suggest that the language behaviour of adults when talking to children
(known by several names by most easily referred to as child-directed speech or CDS) is
specially adapted to support the acquisition process. This support is often described to
as scaffolding for the child's language learning.

Bruner also coined the term Language Acquisition Support System or LASS in
response to Chomsky's LAD. Colwyn Trevarthen studied the interaction between parents
and babies who were too young to speak. He concluded that the turn-taking structure
of conversation is developed through games and non-verbal communication long
before actual words are uttered.

Limitations of Input theories

These theories serve as a useful corrective to Chomsky's early position and it seems
likely that a child will learn more quickly with frequent interaction. However, it has already
been noted that children in all cultures pass through the same stages in acquiring
language. We have also seen that there are cultures in which adults do not adopt special
ways of talking to children, so CDS may be useful but seems not to be essential.

As stated earlier, the various theories should not be seen simply as alternatives.
Rather, each of them offers a partial explanation of the process.

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