THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

ACQUISITION
 Behaviorism
• The behaviorist 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 behavior. This was known as
positive reinforcement. Undesirable behavior was punished or simply not
rewarded - negative reinforcement
• The behaviorist theory believes that “infants learn oral language from other human role models
through a process involving imitation, rewards, and practice. Human role models in an infant’s
environment provide the stimuli and rewards,” (Cooter & Reutzel, 2004). When a child attempts oral
language or imitates the sounds or speech patterns they are usually praised and given affection for
their efforts. Thus, praise and affection becomes the rewards. However, the behaviorist theory is
scrutinized for a variety of reasons. If rewards play such a vital component in language development,
what about the parent who is inattentive or not present when the child attempts speech?
• If a baby’s language learning is motivated strictly by rewards would the speech attempts stop merely
for lack of rewards (Cooter & Reutzel, 2004)? Other cases against this theory include “learning the
use and meaning of abstract words, evidence of novel forms of language not modeled by others, and
uniformity of language acquisition in humans” (Cooter & Reutzel, 2004)
• The major principle of the behaviorist theory rests on the analyses of human
behavior in observable stimulus-response interaction and the association between
them. E.L.T. Thorndike was the first behaviorist to explore the area that learning is
the establishment of associations on particular process of behavior and
consequences of that behavior. Basically, "the behaviorist theory of stimulus-
response learning, particularly as developed in the operant conditioning model of
Skinner, considers all learning to be the establishment of habits as a result of
reinforcement and reward" (Wilga Rivers, 1968, 73). This is very reminiscent of
Pavlov's experiment which indicates that stimulus and response work together.
• According to this category, the babies obtain native language habits via varied babblings
which resemble the appropriate words repeated by a person or object near him. Since for
his babblings and mutterings he is rewarded, this very reward reinforces further
articulations of the same sort into grouping of syllables and words in a similar situation. In
this way, he goes on emitting sounds, groups of sounds, and as he grows up he combines
the sentences via generalizations and analogy (as in *goed for went, *doed, for did, so on),
which in some complicated cases, condition him to commit errors by articulating in
permissible structures in speech. By the age of five or six, or babblings and mutterings
grow into socialized speech but little by little they are internalized as implicit speech, and
thus many of their utterances become indistinguishable from the adults.
• This, then, obviously, means that behaviorist theory is a theory of stimulus-response psychology.
"Through a trial-and-error process, in which acceptable utterances are reinforced by comprehension and
approval, and un acceptable utterances are inhibited by the lack of reward, he gradually learns to make
finer and finer discriminations until his utterances approximate more and more closely the speech of the
community in which he is growing up (Wilga M. Rivers, 1968; 73).
• To put it in other words, children develop a natural affinity to learn the language of their social
surroundings whose importance both over language learning and teaching must never be underestimated.
In this respect behaviorist theory stresses the fact that "human and animal learning is a process of habit
formation. A highly complex learning task, according to this theory may be learned by being broken'
down into smaIl habits. These are formed correct or incorrect responses, are rewarded or, punished,
respectively'.(Hubbard Jones and Thornton Wheeler, 1983; 326). Thus it is clear that the acquisition of
learning in infancy is governed the acquisition of other habits.
 Limitations of Behaviorism
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 1) Basic strategies of language learning within the scope of behaviorist theory are imitation,
reinforcement, and rewarding. However, researches made on the acquisition of learning have
demonstrated that children’s imitation of structures show evidence of almost no innovation;
moreover children "vary considerably in the amount that they imitate" (L.M. Bloom, L. Hood,
and P.L. Lightbown, 1974; 380-420). Since children do not imitate such structures like words,
phrases, clauses and sentences at the same rate they will naturally learn at different rates even
though it must be admitted that imitation is very useful in the acquisition of new vocabulary
items. As for reinforcement, "Unfortunately this view of learning receives little support from
the available evidence" (Herbert H. Clark and Eve V. Clark, 1977; 336), for the parents only
correct the sample structures, and complex structures are occasionally corrected.
• 2) In behaviorist theory, the process of learning relies more on
generalization, rewarding, conditioning, three of which support the
development of analogical learning in children. But it can be argued that a
process of learning or teaching that encourages the learner to construct
phrases, clauses and sentences modeled on previously settled set of rules
and drills is thought to obstruct the instinctive production of language.
Then, habit formation exercises may not naturally promote intrinsically
oriented language learning.
• It is highly unlikely for learning to be the same for each individual; that is, each person
cannot learn equally well in the same conditions in which learning takes place, for the
background and the experience of the learners make everybody learn differently. In
addition, according to Chomsky, there must be some innate capacities which human
beings possess that predispose them to look for basic patters in language.
• The main strategies of the behaviorist theory can only be true for the early stages of
learning which takes place when the kids are in infancy and in early childhood periods.
Moreover, this theory is fruitful for the most part on animal experimentation and
learning.
 Stages of Language Acquisition

• There are four main stages of normal language acquisition: 

• 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.
• Young children often use words in ways that are too narrow or too
broad: "bottle" used only for plastic bottles; "teddy" used only for a
particular bear; "dog" used for lambs, cats, and cows as well as
dogs; "kick" used for pushing and for wing-flapping as well as for
kicking. These underextensions and overextensions develop and
change over time in an individual child's usage
 Perception vs. production

• Clever experiments have shown that most infants can give evidence (for
instance, by gaze direction) of understanding some words at the age of 4-9
months, often even before babbling begins. In fact, the development of
phonological abilities begins even earlier. Newborns can distinguish speech from
non-speech, and can also distinguish among speech sounds (e.g. [t] vs. [d] or [t]
vs. [k]); within a couple of months of birth, infants can distinguish speech in their
native language from speech in other languages.
• Early linguistic interaction with mothers, fathers and other caregivers is almost
certainly important in establishing and consolidating these early abilities, long
before the child is giving any indication of language abilities
 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.
Innateness
• here 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 carers 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.
 Nativist Approach
• The term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that language acquisition is
innately determined, that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a
systematic perception of the language around us, resulting in the construction of an
internalized system of language.
• 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.
• Children are born with a special ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a
language system.
• The environment makes 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.
• 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).
 The Language Acquisition Device
(LAD):
• LAD is the imaginary “black box” which exists somewhere in the brain.  It is thought
to contain all and only the principles which are universal to all human languages.
• For the LAD to work, the child needs access only to samples of a natural language.
These language samples serve as a trigger to activate the device.
• Once it is activated, the child is able to discover the structure of the language to be
learned by matching the innate knowledge of basic grammatical relationships to the
structures of the particular language in the environment.
• More recently, Chomsky and his followers no longer use the term LAD, but refers to
the child's innate endowment as Universal Grammar (UG)
• • The knowledge contained in the LAD is known as universal grammar and includes all the
important characteristics of world grammar. • Children have a critical period of language learning
and only have an innate ability to learn language up to the age of puberty
• 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
 Further revisions
• Dan Isaac Slobin has proposed that it may be more like a mechanism for
working out the rules of language:
• "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."
Evidence to support the innateness theory
• 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
• 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.
• 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
• 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
• 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 realized through a manual system
which fulfils the same function
 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 recognize the reasons why a
child might want to speak, the functions of language
• In 1977, Bard and Sachs published a study of a c hild 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 emphas is 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.
 Interactionist view
• 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 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
• 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