Language Acquisition

Language acquisition: Tomasello (2008) defines language acquisition as the process through which individuals develop the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to communicate. It is therefore the process by which people develop, retain, produce and use words to communicate. Language acquisition there involves the learning of syntax, semantics, phonetics and vocabulary.

Early theory

One of the earliest scientific explanations of language acquisition was provided by Skinner (1957). As one of the pioneers of Behaviorism, he accounted for language development by means of environmental influence.

Skinner argued that children learn language based on behaviorist reinforcement principles by associating words with meanings. Correct utterances are positively reinforced when the child realizes the communicative value of words and phrases.

For example, when the child says milk and the mother will smile and give her some as a result, the child will find this outcome rewarding, enhancing the child`s language development (Ambridge Lieven, 2011).

According to Skinner conditioning plays a role in the learning and acquiring of language as appropriate behaviour is rewarded. Operant conditioning involves reinforcement and imitation. Imitation involves copying adults language patterns and behaviours. Weiten (2004:312) notes that behavioural theorists like Skinner explain how children learn syntax and learn how to construct sentences by imitating the sentences of adults and older children . This has implications for adults such as teachers. Through imitation children are able to acquire language by making the language of the family and teacher their own. It is important that the teacher plans with the child in mind when teaching language. Since children imitate accent, usage, structure and colloquialism and other related language aspects, the role of the teacher is to ensure that children imitate language that is correct. The teacher should be well trained in the teaching of language and other areas of child development. In this case, the teacher becomes the model. Imitation helps the child in facilitating the internalisation of language. The teacher can also facilitate language acquisition by ensuring that the appropriate responses are reinforced by the correct environmental consequences and by meeting the responses and the needs of the children (Edwards, 2000).

The emphasis on the environment by Skinner is of importance to the teacher, in order to facilitate development and acquisition of language. The classroom environment includes the use of games to develop language, training children in listening in order to develop listening skills and oral skills. The classroom and the school environment should help the child to develop vocabulary. This could be in the form of objects and equipment for children to learn and play with. Children play as they learn and learn as they play and the school environment should create a conducive environment.

Conditioning provides training for the child. Operant conditioning is characterised by reinforcement and imitation. The role of the teacher is therefore to create the environment that enables children within the classroom set up to get opportunities to speak and listen. The best way to learn a language is by speaking it. The teacher also has to create conditions that expose children to an environment that assists children to develop linguistically. This can be done in many different forms. These include play, drama, storytelling, reciting poems and singing among other activities that promote speaking and listening.

What is key in these activities is that the children will repeat positively reinforced behaviour. As noted by Santrock (2008) children learn language by imitating adults and by receiving positive or negative reinforcement. There is need to demonstrate the differences between positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. The two concepts can be confusing at times. Positive reinforcement is a reward which strengthens the desired behaviour in language acquisition within the classroom environment in the case of teachers. On the other hand, negative reinforcement is when the teacher withdraws an undesired thing in order to strengthen the re-occurrence of a wanted behaviour in language acquisition. Reinforcement can be in the form of words of praise that encourage the child to keep on trying to express his/her ideas. Children also learn through imitation. At home they imitate their parents and relatives and at school they imitate the teacher and other children they come into contact with. The teacher is therefore a model from which children at school learn and develop language. The teacher as a model has to use the appropriate language from which the children can learn. The teacher has to be aware of the limitations of her/his role as a model. If the teacher becomes a bad model the child is most likely to imitate bad language. The role of the teacher therefore is to reinforce correct language. Such reinforcement can have a lasting effect on the child if the teacher creates an environment that gives children the opportunity to learn not only words but also be able to associate them with different actions. In that regard the teacher has to make language learning as practical as possible.

The teacher does not have to enter into the arguments on which of the two factors (environmental factors and biological factors) plays a major role in language acquisition, but rather to develop an appreciation of the role played by both factors. It is suffice to say that the teacher as part of the environmental factors has to build on the biological influences on language acquisition.

(+) BF Skinner conducted many experiments including placing rats and pigeons into "operant conditioning chambers" to condition them to behave in certain ways (2). He used the principles of his experiments to explain language acquisition.

The difference between Chomsky and Skinner`s beliefs can most simply be put as such: Skinner believes that language is learned, whereas Chomsky believes that language is innate, and is simply developed. It is also important to understand the psychological approaches that each man belongs to, Skinner is a behaviorist, whereas Chomsky is a structuralist. In many ways, the "debate" between the two men is simply a reincarnation of the timless question of "nature versus nurture," which people have found is impossible to answer most of the time. Before analyzing the "debate of the century" it is important to understand that although the two theories were hotly debated, the two men never engaged in dialectical dialogue. In fact, Skinner never bothered to write a response to Chomsky`s critique of his Verbal Behaviour.

Since Skinner never gave a formal response to Chomsky and allowed a "Chomskyan revolution" to occur in the field of linguistics in the 1960`s the verdict as to which psychological mind reigns superior will always be an open ended question, without any sort of consensus. Although it should be known that if there ever was a true debate between Chomsky and Skinner, that Chomsky won under the principles of both forfeiture and acceptance. Chomsky`s theory of universal grammar is now the most widely cited linguistic theory and the most respected by the scientific community (5). There are still heavy death metal behaviorist sympathizers, though, but only time will tell whose theory was correct.

Bandura

On the other hand, Bangura s views on language acquisitions have equally wide implications on the teacher. Bandura s social learning theory shares similarities with Skinner s theory as noted above. It focuses on learning through observation, imitation and modelling. In that regard the children observe the teachers as they talk and imitate them. The teacher as a model has to provide examples that enable the child to learn language from him/her. They do not learn from the teacher only, but can observe those around them. They can therefore learn from other children. They learn and acquire language as a cognitive process within the social context, observation and vicarious reinforcement. Within the context of Bandura s ideas, the teacher has to provide the models for learning language. The teacher has to create the different forms of modelling. These are live model, verbal instruction and symbolic modelling. Thus the teacher has to demonstrate, to describe things in the proper context and language and use teaching and learning aids that may include the different forms of the media such as the internet, radio, movies and television.

The classroom has to be language rich to help in the development and acquisition of language. The classroom environment has to promote the development of different skills. These skills include listening skills, speaking skills, reading skills and writing skills. The teacher has to strike a balance in the development of these skills by providing activities that stimulate language development. This can be done by involving children in drama, music and dance, rhymes, reciting of poems and storytelling. While it is important for the teacher to guide children in storytelling, children should be given opportunities to tell their own stories.

Nativism

=A less established argument is that nature supplies the human mind with specialised learning devices.

The hypothesis that UG plays an essential role in normal child language acquisition arises from species differences: for example, children and household pets may be exposed to quite similar linguistic input, but by the age of three years, the child`s ability to comprehend multi-word utterances vastly outstrips that of the dog or cat. This evidence is all the more impressive when one considers that most children do not receive reliable correction for grammatical errors.<sup>[9]</sup> Indeed, even children who for medical reasons cannot produce speech, and therefore have no possibility of producing an error in the first place, have been found to master both the lexicon and the grammar of their community`s language perfectly.^[10] The fact that children succeed at language acquisition even when their linguistic input is severely impoverished, as it is when no corrective feedback is available, is related to the argument from the poverty of the stimulus, and is another claim for a central role of UG in child language acquisition.

Poverty of the stimulus (POS) is the controversial^[1] argument from linguistics that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language. This is considered evidence contrary to the empiricistidea that language is learned solely through experience. The claim is that the sentences children hear while learning a language do not contain the information needed to develop a thorough understanding of the grammar of the language.^[2]

The POS is often used as evidence for universal grammar. This is the idea that all languages conform to the same structural principles, which define the space of possible languages. Both poverty of the stimulus and universal grammar are terms that can be credited to Noam Chomsky, the main proponent of generative grammar. Chomsky coined the term "poverty of the stimulus" in 1980. However, he had argued for the idea since his 1959 review of B.F. Skinner`s Verbal Behaviour.

Criticism

(-) Critics demonstrated in the 1980s and 1990s that Chomsky`s purported linguistic evidence for poverty of the stimulus may have been false.^[23] Around the same time there was research in applied linguistics and neuroscience that rejected the idea of languages being innate and not learned.^[3] These developments led to the abandonment of innatism by the mainstream child language acquisition community, with generative grammar being pushed into the margins. According to some professionals, decades of research were wasted between 1964 and 2014 owing to the assumption of the poverty of the stimulus an enterprise which has failed to make a lasting impact.

(-) Paul Griffiths, in "What is Innateness?", argues that innateness is too confusing a concept to be fruitfully employed as it confuses "empirically dissociated" concepts. In a previous paper, Griffiths argued that innateness specifically confuses these three distinct biological concepts: developmental fixity, species nature, and intended outcome. Developmental fixity refers to how insensitive a trait is to environmental input, species nature reflects what it is to be an organism of a certain kind, and intended outcome is how an organism is meant to develop.

(-) 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 careers. 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 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.

(-) The concept of LAD is unsupported by evolutionary anthropology. It shows that there is a gradual adaptation of the human body to the use of language, rather than a sudden appearance of a complete set of binary parameters (which are common to digital computers but not to neurological systems such as a human brain) describing the whole spectrum of possible grammars ever to have existed and ever to exist.

The theory has several hypothetical constructs, such as movement, empty categories, complex underlying structures, and strict binary branching that cannot possibly be acquired from any amount of input.

The emphasis on the rule-learning is over-enthusiastic. Linguistically, this approach s primary concern is only syntax (grammars/composition) Semantics, Pragmatics and discourses are completely excluded.

UG is concerned exclusively with the developmental linguistic route. Social and psychological variables are ignored.

UG approach is methodological. The theory is preoccupied with modelling of competence. The study of naturalistic performance is not seen as a suitable source to analyse mental representations of language.

Strengths

(+) Children must be born with an innate capacity for language development

Children are born with an innate tendency for language acquisition, and that this ability makes the task of learning a first language easier than it would otherwise be.

The human brain is ready naturally for language in the sense when children are exposed to speech, certain general principles for discovering or structuring language automatically begin to operate.

Skinner (Behaviourist)

Chomsky (Nativist)

B.F. Skinner s published verbal behaviour in 1957

Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures 1957

Philosophical

Rational and factual

Extension of psychological theory that held environmental influences responsible for all human behaviours including first language acquisition

A scientific measure taken to explain linguistic abilities based on biological adaptation and natural selection

Environment stimulates the verbal behaviour in a child which is reinforced and strengthened by the time due to frequently occurring events

A child s brain is born with the ability to acquire language and capability of linguistic innovation. Thus, it can be seen that children say a lot of things that they have never been trained to say.

Skinner believed in empiricist traditions and emphasized that only after the documentation of observed perceptible events one can formulate theories.

Chomsky grew out of rationalist tradition and suggested that human brain first forms questions and analysis of events which are then developed rationally to test perceptible events.

Child is a blank slate that is filled up by knowledge gained through experience

Child s has a position within the smart-baby tradition because of innate learning mechanism that enables a child to figure out how the language works

It is possible that both views are equally responsible for first language acquisition but Chomsky (1959) and skinner (1957) strongly denied each other s views. However, researchers in 21^st ury find it hard to depend on only one school of thought because according to recent discoveries learning behaviour starts before birth as foetus s auditory system is capable of perceiving environmental sounds in third trimester of pregnancy. Thus, more research in this area is required to explain and take in to account foetus s perceptual system to define first language acquisition.

Investigators of Universal Grammar are still trying to convince that language is a task too demanding to acquire without specific innate equipment, whereas the constructivist researchers are fiercely arguing for the importance of linguistic input.

The biggest questions, however, are yet unanswered. What is the exact process that transforms the child s utterances into grammatically correct, adult-like speech? How much does the child need to be exposed to language to achieve the adult-like state?

What account can explain variation between languages and the language acquisition process in children acquiring very different languages to English? The mystery of language acquisition is granted to keep psychologists and linguists alike astonished a decade after decade.

CONCLUSION

Like many things in psychology, and in a broader sense, science, the issue of language acquisition is still without a definite answer. It is our task as humans to engage in the praxis of inquiry and conversely to seek out evidence and rationale to support our claims. People like myself have a certain advantage, though. We are humbled by the lack of acuity that makes us merely observers, but at the same time we hold a position over the brilliant minds that offer up their work for our judgement. No matter how intelligent men like Noam Chomsky and BF Skinner may be, it is still the the observer that holds the power of consensus.

The debate between Skinner and Chomsky on language acquisition has become a bone of contention because of the longevity of the debate and the questions it reintroduces. But like the truism that in science there are rarely definite answers, there is another truism which could help us come to a compromise. That is the truism and the possibility that is often overlooked, that maybe, both of these men were correct in their suppositions of language. Which is why I contest that we look at the debate from a biopsychosocial perspective rather than from a behaviourist perspective like Skinner, or a structuralist perspective, like Chomsky. By looking at language acquisition from a biopsychosocial perspective we effectively confront this truism, that in life there is often more than one truth. Lastly, it is important to recognise the contributions that a simple disagreement of men have had on psychology.

Both Chomsky and Skinner`s theories have led to significant scientific advancements. Skinner`s theory of language acquisition and his use of operant conditioning to explain how the process occurs has led to very practical real world applications, such as in the classroom or in the workplace (6). Chomsky`s theory of universal grammar has led to and inspired many important studies on indigenous tongues in the Amazon particularly, but also other isolated societies around the world. Such as the study on the Amazon tribe that has no numeracy, which was actually meant to disprove Chomsky, but nonetheless was only conducted because of him (7). In many ways, the lack of agreement upon which theory is correct has driven both Noam Chomsky and BF Skinner to expand upon their theories, conduct new experiments and studies, and perhaps most importantly, inspire new generations of psychologists seeking to continue the endless endeavor of understanding language.

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