Explaining first language

acquisition
Topics covered in this meeting…
• How do children acquire their first language?

• Three main accounts have been advanced:

• Behaviourist perspective..
• Innatist perspective..
• Critical Period Hypothesis
• Interactionist perspective..
What children know:

• These descriptions of language development from infancy through the

early school years show that we have considerable knowledge of what
children learn in their early language development.

• More controversial, however, are questions about how this

development takes place.
How children learn language:
• What abilities does the child bring to the task and what are the
contributions of the environment?

• Since the middle of the 20th century, three main theoretical positions
have been advanced to explain language development: behaviourist,
innatist, and interactional/developmental perspectives.
The behaviourist perspective
• Behaviourism is a theory of learning that was influential in the 1940s
and 1950s, especially in the United States.

• With regard to language learning, the best-known proponent of this

psychological theory was B. F. Skinner (1957).
The behaviourist perspective

• Traditional behaviourists hypothesized that when children imitated the

language produced by those around them, their attempts to reproduce
what they heard received ‘positive reinforcement’.

• This could take the form of praise or just successful communication.

The behaviourist perspective
• Thus encouraged by their environment, children would continue to
imitate and practise these sounds and patterns until they formed
‘habits’ of correct language use.

• According to this view, the quality and quantity of the language the
child hears, as well as the consistency of the reinforcement offered by
others in the environment, would shape the child’s language
behaviour.
The behaviourist perspective
• This theory gives great importance to the environment as the source of
everything the child needs to learn.

• The behaviourists viewed imitation and practice as the primary

processes in language development.

• To clarify what is meant by these two terms, consider the following

definitions and examples.
The behaviourist perspective
• Imitation: word-for-word repetition of all or part of someone else’s
utterance.

• MOTHER: Shall we play with the dolls?

• LUCY: Play with dolls
The behaviourist perspective

• Practice: repetitive manipulation of form.

• CINDY: He eat carrots. The other one eat carrots. They both eat
carrots.
The behaviourist perspective
• Let’s examine the transcripts from Peter, Cindy, and Kathryn. They
were all about 24 months old when they were recorded as they played
with a visiting adult. Using the definitions above, notice how Peter
imitates the adult in the following dialogue.

• Peter (24 months) is playing with a dump truck while two adults, Patsy
and Lois, look on.
PETER Get more.
LOIS You’re gonna put more wheels in the dump truck?
PETER Dump truck. Wheels. Dump truck.
The behaviourist perspective
(Later)

• PATSY What happened to it (the truck)?

• PETER Lose it. Dump truck! Dump truck! Fall! Fall!
• LOIS Yes, the dump truck fell down.
• PETER Dump truck fell down. Dump truck.
The behaviourist perspective
• 30–40 per cent of his sentences were imitations of what someone else
had just said. His imitations were not random. That is, he did not
simply imitate 30–40 per cent of everything he heard.

• Detailed analyses of large samples of Peter’s speech over about a year

showed that he imitated words and sentence structures that were just
beginning to appear in his spontaneous speech.
The behaviourist perspective
• Once these new elements became solidly grounded in his language
system, he stopped imitating them and went on to imitate others.
• Unlike a parrot who imitates the familiar and continues to repeat the
same things again and again, children appear to imitate selectively.
• The choice of what to imitate seems to be based on something new
that they have just begun to understand and use, not simply on what is
available in the environment.
The behaviourist perspective
• For example, consider how Cindy imitates and practises language in
the following conversations. Cindy (24 months, 16 days) is looking at
a picture of a carrot in a book and trying to get Patsy’s attention.

• CINDY Kawo? kawo? kawo? kawo? kawo?

• PATSY What are the rabbits eating?
• CINDY They eating … kando?
• PATSY No, that’s a carrot.
• CINDY Carrot. (pointing to each carrot on the page) The
other … carrot. The other carrot. The other carrot.
The behaviourist perspective
• One week later, Cindy opens the book to the same page.)

• CINDY Here’s the carrots. (pointing) Is that a carrot?

• PATSY Yes.
The behaviourist perspective
• Cindy appears to be working hard on her language acquisition. She
practises new words and structures in a way that sounds like a student
in some foreign language classes!

• Perhaps most interesting is that she remembers the ‘language lesson’ a

week later and turns straight to the page in the book she had not seen
since Patsy’s last visit.

• What is most striking is that, like Peter, her imitation and practice
appear to be focused on what she is currently ‘working on’.
Patterns in language
• The first example shows a child in the process of learning patterns in
language, in this case the rules of word formation, and
overgeneralizing them to new contexts.
• Randall (36 months) had a sore on his hand.

• MOTHER Maybe we need to take you to the doctor.

• RANDALL Why? So he can doc my little bump?

• Randall forms the verb ‘doc’ from the noun ‘doctor’, by analogy with
farmers who farm, swimmers who swim, and actors who act.
Critique against behaviourism
• Behaviourism seems to offer a reasonable way of understanding how
children learn some of the regular and routine aspects of language,
especially at the earliest stages.

• However, children who do little overt imitation acquire language as

fully and rapidly as those who imitate a lot. And although
behaviourism goes some way to explaining the sorts of
overgeneralization that children make, classical behaviourism is not a
satisfactory explanation for the acquisition of the more complex
grammar that children acquire.

• These limitations led researchers to look for different explanations for

language acquisition.
The innatist perspective
• Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential figures in linguistics,
and his ideas about how language is acquired and how it is stored in
the mind sparked a revolution in many aspects of linguistics and
psychology, including the study of language acquisition.

• The innatist perspective is related to Chomsky’s hypothesis that all

human languages are based on some innate universal principles.
The innatist perspective
• Chomsky challenged the behaviourist explanation for language
acquisition. He argued that children are biologically programmed for
language and that language develops in the child in just the same way
that other biological functions develop.

• For example, every child will learn to walk as long as adequate

nourishment and reasonable freedom of movement are provided. The
child does not have to be taught.
The innatist perspective
• Most children learn to walk at about the same age, and walking is
essentially the same in all normal human beings. For Chomsky,
language acquisition is very similar.

• The environment makes only 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.
 The innatist perspective
• Chomsky argued that the behaviourist theory failed to account for ‘the
logical problem of language acquisition’—the fact that children come to
know more about the structure of their language than they could reasonably
be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language they hear.

• The language children are exposed to includes false starts, incomplete

sentences, and slips of the tongue, and yet they learn to distinguish between
grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
The innatist perspective
• He concluded that children’s minds are not blank slates to be filled by
imitating language they hear in the environment.

• Instead, he hypothesized, children are born with a specific innate

ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language
system on the basis of the samples of a natural language they are
exposed to.
The innatist perspective
• This innate endowment was seen as a sort of template, containing the
principles that are universal to all human languages. This universal
grammar (UG) would prevent the child from pursuing all sorts of
wrong hypotheses about how language systems might work.

• If children are pre-equipped with UG, then what they have to learn is
the ways in which the language they are acquiring makes use of these
principles.
The innatist perspective
• Consider the following sentences. These English sentences contain the
reflexive pronoun ‘himself’. Both the pronoun and the noun it refers to
(the antecedent) are printed in italics. (An asterisk (*) at the beginning
of a sentence indicates that the sentence is ungrammatical.)
• John saw himself.
• *Himself saw John.
• Looking after himself bores John.
• John said that Fred liked himself.
• *John said that Fred liked himself.
• John told Bill to wash himself.
• *John told Bill to wash himself.
The innatist perspective
• John promised Bill to wash himself.

• John believes himself to be intelligent (non-finite clause).

• *John believes that himself is intelligent (finite clause).

• When we look at this kind of complexity, it seems it would be very

hard to learn, and children do make errors along the way.
The innatist perspective
• Yet, most school-age children would be able to correctly interpret the
grammatical sentences and recognize the ungrammaticality of the
others.

• Researchers who study language acquisition from the innatist

perspective argue that such complex grammar could never be learned
purely on the basis of imitating and practising sentences available in
the input.
The innatist perspective
• They hypothesize that since all children acquire the language of their
environment, they must have some innate mechanism or knowledge
that allows them to discover such complex syntax in spite of
limitations of the input.

• They hypothesize furthermore that the innate mechanism is used

exclusively for language acquisition.