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Language Acquisition:
Language is quintessentially human. We use spoken language every day, face-to- face,
as a means of communication, while written language allows us to record and hold on
to our history across generations. Language itself is very complex. It has a sound
system that allows us to use numerous distinct words, a vocabulary of some 50,000 to
100,000 terms for many adults, and a series of constructions for relating these words.
It allows us to express innumerable ideas, describe events, tell stories, recite poems,
buy, sell, or bargain in markets, administer legal systems, make political speeches,
and participate in the myriad other activities that make up the societies we live in.
Language allows us to coordinate what we do with others, relay information, find out
answers, and carry out everyday activities gossiping, making puns, writing memos,
reading newspapers, learning histories, enjoying novels, greeting friends, telling
stories, selling cars, reading instructions the list is unending. Language use calls for
an intricate web of skills we usually take for granted. It is an integral part of everyday
life that we rely on to convey wants and needs, thoughts, concerns, and plans. Using
language seems as natural as breathing or walking.
But babies are not born talking. They learn language, starting immediately from birth.
What do they learn? They need sounds and words, meanings and constructions. They
need to know what to use where and when, how to integrate language with other
modes of communication, how to make themselves understood and how to understand
others. How does this process take place? When do children master the skills needed
for using language successfully? What stages do they go through as they learn to
understand and talk? Do the languages they learn affect the way they think?
Do children have to learn everything about language and language use from scratch?
Do they start out at birth with John Lockes tabula rasa, or do they come with certain
things already pre-wired? Debate over this has led many to draw strict lines between
nature (any innate capacities and structures children are born with) and nurture
(what they gain from experience). Biologists would generally argue that this
dichotomy is a false one. From conception on, fetal development is shaped by
maternal health and nutrition as well as by the fetal cells that are maturing, so to
distinguish nature from nurture in development is close to impossible.
Following is a brief overview of the major linguistic theories that have propounded
upon the subject of language acquisition. From Chomskys Mentalism to Skinnerian
Behaviorism, to a couple of other important theories proposed, linguists have
struggled since centuries to understand the remarkable phenomenon of language
learning and acquisition.

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Theories of Child Language Acquisition

Language is acquired, not "learned." Language is an instinct and not a learned skill
like playing the piano or riding a bicycle. But how do children acquire language? There
are currently three general theories of language acquisition:

Imitation Theory

Reinforcement Theory

The Innateness Theory plus Active Construction of Grammar Theory

Imitation Theory
Imitation theory says that children learn grammar by memorizing the words and
sentences of their language. Before attacking this view, let's make sure we recognize
that language acquisition MUST involve a lot of memorizing. Children born of Mexican
Spanish-speaking parents in an English speaking environment will learn English, even if
they hear only Spanish from their parents. There's simply no way to get around this
problem. Clearly, children must hear the words (or see the signs) of their language in
order to go about committing them to their mental dictionaries, and clearly English
children learn English because they are getting English input, but memorizing alone is
not adequate. Here are some problems with the imitation perspective:

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Children produce many things not in the adult grammar (like 'nana' for
banana), i.e. they produce things not produced by adults. Some people might
say that this is simply a consequence of the difficulty of learning how to speak
and not a problem for the imitation theory. Speech is a complex activity
requiring great muscular coordination, and little kids are simply inept at
production, but they may still be simply memorizing. Maybe, but the problems
don't end here.

Children make consistent, predictable errors that cannot be attributed to

mispronunciation and which still are not ever heard in the adult grammar.
Children make errors like saying "goed" instead of "went" or "drawed" instead of
"drew". These errors are important. Why? Because they indicate that the child
CANNOT simply be memorizing all of the words in her or his language. Adults
don't make these errors! IF children are merely imitating, we have NO
explanation for this. One explanation is that kids are building a grammar, not
simply memorizing, and that such errors are indications that the children are
applying a past tense "rule" to irregular verbs that they have not yet committed
to memory as exceptions to the normal pattern. This is a good approach, but it
doesn't square with imitation theory.

Children can produce and understand novel sentences. This problem is

something we've talked about all semester. It's the infinite use of finite means
issue dressed up in the context of child language acquisition. If imitation is
right, we'd predict that kids would not produce sentences they had not already
heard. If we assume that children are constructing grammars, however, we'd
EXPECT them to do this. They acquire the "rules" of their syntax and thus have
a powerful device for producing novel sentences according to the general
syntactic rules of their grammar. Back to the problem, then, for imitation
theory. It is simply puzzling why children should have this capacity if language
acquisition boils down simply to memorization of input. Kids should not be able
to produce sentences not explicitly received as input.

Reinforcement Theory
The basic idea here is that children learn to speak like adults because they are taught
to do so by being praised and otherwise rewarded for doing things right. At the same
time, they are helped because parents "correct" them when they make mistakes.
There are two major flaws in this theory.

Strangely enough, parents actually don't seem to correct children's grammar

as much as we might think, and they don't praise them for using proper
adult grammatical constructions either. What parents (or other caretakers)
DO seem to do is praise children for being truthful. So if a child uses a well
formed sentence such as "the dog wants to eat", parents tend to correct the

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child is the sentence is not true, as in "No, Jimmy, the dog doesn't want to eat.
It just ate." But if children are truthful but produce sentences that are
ungrammatical in the adult grammar, such as "Nancy goed to school yesterday,"
parents often respond, "Yes, she did" without bothering to correct the incorrect
"goed".

This isn't to say that parents never attempt to correct their children's grammar.
But even when they do, there is little evidence that this has any great effect
on the language development of the child. Often times, children seem
determined to continue to produce incorrect forms DESPITE correction from
adults. And when adults insist on trying to make the child "do it right", more
often that not everyone involved has a frustrating time.

The bottom line is this. If reinforcement theory is really at the root of language
acquisition, why does it seem to (a) not even be what parents do most of the time,
and (b) hardly effective, if effective at all, when used for correction?
The Innateness Theory
This brings us to our third (and preferred) candidate. The innateness theory says that
the brain of human beings is genetically predisposed for language. Just as we are
made to have two arms and are designed to walk, we are made to talk.
Language development in humans seems to exhibit these properties, some of which
we'll look at a little more closely below. Briefly, let's note why.
The behavior emerges before it seems necessary. Language does appear
to emerge before it is necessary to the extent that we begin to develop and
use it before we need it to fend for ourselves, i.e. while our every need is still
being taken care of by our primary caregiver(s).
Its appearance is not the result of a conscious decision. Children don't
decide to start acquiring language. Language simply develops in them.
Compare this to deciding whether or not to join the track team, or deciding
whether or not to take an elective, or deciding whether or not to learn golf.
Its emergence is not triggered by external events (though the surrounding
environment must be sufficiently rich for it to develop adequately). What this
means is that language doesn't emerge because adults suddenly decide that it's
time for "language school" or organized "language play sessions". The only thing
necessary is that kids live in a world of language. What I said in class, I think, is
that we can think of it metaphorically as if we're born ready to sing and need
simply to be exposed to the song.

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Direct teaching and intensive practice have relatively little effect. This is
true. Correcting children and drilling them on grammar won't make them learn
language any faster. Compare this to say, piano lessons. Without the drills and
intense lessons, it is very difficult to learn to play the piano.
There is a regular sequence of "milestones" as the behavior develops, and
these can usually be correlated with age and other aspects of development.
We'll look at this more below, but in broad strokes, this is true. Kids acquire
language systematically, and cross the same basic milestones at roughly the
same time regardless of the language that they are speaking.
There is likely to be a critical period. This means that there is likely to be
a period during which language acquisition is possible and after which language
acquisition becomes highly unlikely, if not impossible. The idea is basically that
there is a window of opportunity for language acquisition. This notion is
generally accepted in one form or another by most linguists, though there is
much debate regarding the issue. There are thought to be TWO critical periods.
The first is hypothesized to last from birth to about two years old. During this
time, it is hypothesized that if the child is not exposed to language at all, the
child will never be able to gain "native" mastery of a language. The idea is that
during the first couple of years of life, the language acquisition process has
particular consequences for brain development and if the period is missed, the
brain will never develop the same structures later. The second "critical period"
has more to do with the issue of second language acquisition. Here, the basic
idea is that after puberty, it is impossible (or nearly impossible) to learn a
second language with "native" mastery. More on this in our next lesson.
To summarize, then, the innateness theory of language says
1. children must be neurologically capable of utilizing sounds (or sign language)
2. not only are humans genetically predisposed to acquire language, but the brain
is somewhat equipped for language acquisition.
So how do children acquire language if they are genetically predisposed to language?
Unlike the Imitation Theory, which says children imitate what they hear, and the
Reinforcement Theory, which says children learn when they are corrected, The Active
Construction of Grammar Theory says children actively "invent" the rules of grammar
for themselves, a trial an error over time. Now, this is not to say that the grammar
that they invent isn't based on the language around them. But the crucial point is this.
Only this approach explains how children do things like produce incorrect past tense

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forms such as "goed" or " hitted", or how they generate novel sentences that they have
never heard, or why they seem almost impervious to correction from adults.
Coming back to the question of forms such as "goed", the issue is actually doubly
interesting. Why? Because kids seem actually to acquire some irregular past tense
forms and use them pretty early. Then, they often seem to "lose" them, coming out
with things like "goed". And then, after a while, they start using the correct form
again. What's happening? This is what seems to be the case. At first, the child does
memorize a form like "went", by hearing it and associating it with some activity and
committing it to her or his lexicon. Then, however, the child's grammar gets to a point
where a regular "rule" of past tense formation is solidified. At this point, the child
over generalizes and applies the rule to the word "go" to get "goed" and this regular
pattern overwhelms the irregular form. Finally, the child realizes that "went" is an
exception to the past tense rule and again modifies her or his grammar accordingly by
marking "go" as a verb that doesn't undergo the regular process of past tense
formation and by reactivating "went" as the past form. Note that imitation and
reinforcement have a tough time accounting for this type of phenomenon. Basically,
in fact, they can't. The Active Construction of Grammar Theory seems to be the best
explanation so far

Imitation vs Instinct
Noam Chomsky, himself, critiqued Skinner profusely. Chomsky believed that the
extension of technical vocabulary from the animal laboratory to the domain of verbal
behavior might not be justified. The analysis of human behavior might require
additional or perhaps even entirely separate principles. In effect, Chomsky was
betting that human verbal behavior is qualitatively different from the behavior of
nonverbal organisms; Skinner was betting that it isn't. One critic, Alfie Kohn, rejected
Skinner's ideas and sided with Chomsky because he, too, believed that Skinners
theory treated human beings as if they were animals in a lab. In fact, according to
such critics as Kohn, most of Skinner's experiments were done with lab animals, not
with human beings. In addition, critics have rejected the use of Skinner's approach in
the classroom, holding that the learning process cannot be facilitated within a
schedule of rewards and punishments but is a part of the human makeup that should
be followed freely, not by coercion. Moreover, many critics have held that the social
application of Skinner's theory would lead to absolute totalitarianism, where every
thought and act of the citizen would be the subject of scientific regulation. In other
words, society would become a university-based, behaviorist and scientific oligarchy.
In short, critics of Skinnerian behaviorism believed that there is nowhere near enough
information in the language examples that are uttered to children to account

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completely for the rich complex language that children acquire at such a young age.
This was known as the poverty of stimulus argument. Another supporting factor that
language is innate is the fact that children are never really formally taught a set of
rules that assisted in the formation of language. Even if there were rules implanted
within the child there are definitely not enough examples of the rules for the child to
accurately grasp the concept quickly enough to form language properly. Almost every
utterance that we speak is new to a child and involves a complex set of rules. If you
think about it, these are a lot of rules for a young child to learn. Though the
environment plays a crucial role in the language acquisition of any child, only external
stimulus is not enough for a child to produce language.
What is the steven pinkers point of view of it?
Pinker criticizes a number of common ideas about language, for example that children must
be taught to use it, that most people's grammar is poor, that the quality of language is
steadily declining, that language has a heavy influence on a person's possible range of
thoughts (the SapirWhorf hypothesis), and that nonhuman animals have been taught language
(see Great Ape language). Pinker sees language as an ability unique to humans, produced by
evolution to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He
compares language to other species' specialized adaptations such as spiders' web-weaving or
beavers' dam-building behavior, calling all three "instincts".
By calling language an instinct, Pinker means that it is not a human invention in the sense
that metalworking and even writing are. While only some human cultures possess these
technologies, all cultures possess language. As further evidence for the universality of
language, Pinker notes that children spontaneously invent a consistent grammatical speech (a
creole) even if they grow up among a mixed-culture population speaking an informal trade
pidgin with no consistent rules. Deaf babies "babble" with their hands as others normally do
with voice, and spontaneously invent sign languages with true grammar rather than a crude
"me Tarzan, you Jane" pointing system. Language (speech) also develops in the absence of
formal instruction or active attempts by parents to correct children's grammar. These signs
suggest that rather than being a human invention, language is an innate human ability. Pinker
also distinguishes language from humans' general reasoning ability, emphasizing that it is not
simply a mark of advanced intelligence but rather a specialized "mental module". He
distinguishes the linguist's notion of grammar, such as the placement of adjectives, from
formal rules such as those in the American English writing style guide. He argues that because
rules like "a preposition is not a proper word to end a sentence with" must be explicitly
taught, they are irrelevant to actual communication and should be ignored.
Pinker attempts to trace the outlines of the language instinct by citing his own studies of
language acquisition in children, and the works of many other linguists and psychologists in
multiple fields, as well as numerous examples from popular culture. He notes, for instance,
that specific types of brain damage cause specific impairments of language such as Broca's
aphasia or Wernicke's aphasia, that specific types of grammatical construction are especially

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hard to understand, and that there seems to be a critical period in childhood for language
development just as there is a critical period for vision development in cats. Much of the book
refers to Chomsky's concept of a universal grammar, a meta-grammar into which all human
languages fit. Pinker explains that a universal grammar represents specific structures in the
human brain that recognize the general rules of other humans' speech, such as whether the
local language places adjectives before or after nouns, and begin a specialized and very rapid
learning process not explainable as reasoning from first principles or pure logic. This learning
machinery exists only during a specific critical period of childhood and is then disassembled
for thrift, freeing resources in an energy-hungry brain.

Who was he?

Steven Arthur "Steve" Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born American cognitive
scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor
in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of
evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
What is he said abou blind children while learning a language?
Blind children, whose access to the nonlinguistic world is obviously severely limited, learn
language without many problems (Landau & Gleitman, 1985). And when children do succeed
in guessing a parent's meaning, it can't be by simple temporal contiguity. For example,
Gleitman (1990) points out that when a mother arriving home from work opens the door, she
is likely to say, "What did you do today?," not I'm opening the door. Similarly, she is likely to
say "Eat your peas" when her child is, say, looking at the dog, and certainly not when the child
is already eating peas.
Still, the assumption of context-derived semantic input is a reasonable idealization, if one
considers the abilities of the whole child. The child must keep an updated mental model of
the current situation, created by mental faculties for perceiving objects and events and the
states of mind and communicative intentions of other humans. The child can use this
knowledge, plus the meanings of any familiar words in the sentence, to infer what the parent
probably meant. In Section we will discuss how children might fill the important gaps in what
they can infer from context.

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Conclusion

The nature and nurture debate might never know an end and linguists even now
argue over these theories of acquisition and their validity. Whether Chomsky was right
or Skinner was, or whether Piaget was closer to the truth than Vygotsky might never
be fully affirmed, but the mere study of all these four theories broadens ones horizon
on the problem of language acquisition and presents the student of linguistics with
various possibilities to choose from. Each theory has been criticized over time and its
weaknesses have been mentioned in the paper to give an unprejudiced and objective
account. Chomsky has been criticized for his indeterminacy, Skinner for his
inconclusiveness, Piaget for his lack of objectivity, and Vygotsky for reasons of
another kind. But all of these four theorists have made tremendous contributions in
the field of linguistics and even if their theories possess some major flaws, they still
present interesting and intriguing concepts to ponder upon. Chomskys Mentalism
suggests the innateness of the language ability in human beings, Skinners
Behaviorism emphasizes upon the external behavior of children and regards it the key
essential in the process of language acquisition, Piagets Cognitivism concludes that
all language learning is the result of the childs cognitive growth, while Vygotskys
Interactionism suggests that language acquisition comes only through the interaction
of children with their environment.
This paper has attempted to define and describe all four of these theories with an
unprejudiced tone and it has been tried to give an interesting, lucid and
comprehensive analysis of all.

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Bibliography

Books:
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Noam Chomsky
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar, David Lebeaux
First Language Acquisition, Eve V. Clark

Websites:
www.wikipedia.com
www.google.com
www.academia.edu