Child language acquisition - theories

Behaviourist thoery (imitation and reinforcement)

Skinner - argues that children acquire language by imitating the speech of others. When a child produces words successfully and they recieve praise and encouragement, they will subsequently be motivated to repeat the behaviour. The child may even see that their caregiver is happy and approving. This reinforcement assists the child's use of langauge and encourages development.

Evaluation - in terms of phonological development and acquring lexis, imitation does play an important part. Children develop regional accents, showing that they do imitate sounds around them. However, all children pass through the same stages of language development regardless of the amount of adult reinforcement they recieve.

Children cannot acquire grammar by imitation as sentences are rarely spoken in the same way twice. Children say 'wented' and 'mans' for example - they have not heard an adult say these words and they have not been encouraged to make these virtuous errors.

Jean Berko - 'wug test'
Children discover the principals that underline the constructions and generate new utterances. In Berko's experiment, she said to the child, 'this is a wug, now there are two of them, what are they?' The child responded 'wugs'. Then Berko said to the child 'what are they doing?' and  the child said 'wugging'.

Nativism (innateness theory)

Naom Chomsky - proopsed that children have an innate ability to extract the rules underling language from the words they hear around them. He believed that when the human brain is exposed to speech at birth, it will automatically begin to recieve and make sense of utterances because it is programmed to do so. Chomsky called this a 'language acquisition device' (LAD). The programmed patterns 'primary linguistic data' are general and the child has to learn the rules by applying them.

Evaluation - the existance of  'LAD' would explain:
The impressive speed at which children acquire language.
Children of all cultures pass through the similar stages of linguistic development.
The existance of grammatical features common to all languages.
Children are able to understand and use new sentences and constructions without having had any previous experience of them.
However, Chomsky's theory underestimates the power and role of language as a social phenomenon. (Interaction with other people). It implies that language acquisition will happen automatically. Case studies, such as the 'Genie' case indicate that human contact is essential for becoming a competent speaker.

Therefore both Skinner's 'imitation and reinforcement' and Chomsky's 'nativism' theory are relevant and play an important part in children's acquisition of language.

The critical development period

Lennenberg developed Chomsky's idea of 'LAD'. He hypothesised that there is a critical development period within which a child must be exposed to language for them to develop normally. Lennenberg advocated that a child must acquire the basics of language through human interaction by the time they reach puberty.

There have been occasional cases of 'wild' or ferrel children who have been deprived of normal human contact and therefore never acquired language. Some have been discovered at a young age and rapidly caught up on linguistic development. However, those cases discovered as teenagers, rarely manage more than a few words. For example, Russian child Oxana Malaya, who was abandoned by alcoholic parents as a baby and brought up by dogs, was able to name objects, but couldn't actually string a sentence together.

Piaget - 'egocentricism'

Piaget argues that children are 'egocentric', meaning they regard themselves and their own opinions/interets as most important or valid. As a result, they often use persona pronouns, such as 'my' and 'mine'.

Input thoeries

Bruner - input theories stress the role of interaction in the development of langauge, focusing in particular on the interaction between children and caregivers. He calls this 'child-directed speech'. A child's language acquisition is said to depend on the contribution or input made by parents and 'significant others'.

How caregivers alter their speech, when speaking to children, giving them specific opportunities to take part in discourse:
Caregivers speak more slowly to children. They use simplified constructions and less complex vocabulary, this makes it easier for a child to imitate their caregiver.
Caregivers expand the child's speech. e.g. 'All gone sweets', here the child has used an irregular sentence structure and omitted the definite article 'the' and the verb 'have'. Therefore the caregiver helps to correct the child by saying 'Yes. The sweets have all gone, haven't they? In this way, the child's vocabulary and sense of sentence structure is gradually extended.
Caregivers introduce new lexis by using familiar sentence frames 'what's...?', 'it's a...'
Parental interaction introduces conventions of conversation: turn taking, question and answer sequences etc, assisting with pragmatic development.

Engles

Although there are very similar patterns in langauge used by adults of various kinds towards children, there are also differences. Fathers tend to be more demanding than mothers, using more direct questions and a wider range of vocabulary.

Distinctive characteristics of CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH

Phonology:
Slower, clearer pronnunciation. Makes language more accessible.
More pauses between phrases/sentencesto give child opportunity to absorb what is being said.
Higher pitch and more range of pitch. This helps to keep the child's attention.
Exaggerated intonation and stress. The sing-song intonation in particular makes this variety of speech particuarly distinctive.

Lexis:
Simpler, more resirictive vocabulary. More concrete nouns, relating to the child's 'here and now'. All objects named in broad categories e.g. 'dog', not 'spaniel'.
Diminutive forms of nouns e.g. 'doggie', 'horsie'.
Reduplication e.g. 'mamma', 'choo-choo'

Grammar:
Simpler constructions
Short constructions with many pauses, to mark the end of grammatical units.
Sentence frames e.g. 'where's...?', 'do you want a...?'
Grammar and meaning are simplified to correspond with the child's actual ability in language. e.g. a two year old's average sentence is 4 words, so the caregiver will also use 4 words.
Frequent use of imperatives.
High degree of reinforcement to new words or structures to clarify new meaning.
Frequent questions to elict a response.
Use auxiliary verbs, developing grammatical ability.
Personal pronouns infrequent. Proper nouns used instead. 'Give it to mummy', not 'Give it to me'.

Discourse:
Questions and tag questions.
Expansion - to build on a child's speech amd encourage new structures.
Feedback.
Face-to-face communication.

Bruner - puts language acquisition firmly into context, emphasising that language gets things done. 'Children learn language initially to get what they want, play games, stay connected with those on whom they are dependent'.
Proposed the existance of LASS (Language acquisition support system). Refers to the support for language provided by parents/caregivers.

Evaluation of input theories - the benefits of child-directed speech are clear but it is not possible to identify precisely the links between structures parents use and their appearance in their child's language. It doesn't seem to be essential that adults address children in a particular way as children reared in cultures where adults do not alter their speech when addressing children, still appear to acquire language at a normal rate of development.