Discuss the various theories of Language Acquisition
2b)
The human race has been trying to explore the concept of language acquisition in children for centuries, and due to the nature of the subject matter, this of course is very difficult. The main debate between language theorists, however, began in the 20th century with the nature versus nurture debate.
The generally accepted theory of language acquisition, supported by B. F. Skinner, was that children were completely lacking in the ability to converse when born, and that language was just another learned skill, such as walking and crawling. Supporting the argument that language acquisition was all due to the “nurturing” of the child, rather than an innate capacity to learn, Skinner believed in the theory of imitation and reinforcement. This concept suggests that children learn through positive and negative feedback (praise as opposed to corrections) from their parents or carers. To a certain extent, this theory could account for a large proportion of a child’s development. Behaviourists who have observed parents with their children or young children in nurseries have noticed that when an dult suggests a new word to a child, the child is very likely to use it. However, there are of course many obvious limitations of this theory. When parents try to correct children too much, research has shown that children actually progess slower because they are not being allowed to express themselves as freely. Often, when a parent attempts to make a child repeat a certain sentence, the child is unable to respond correctly, because the syntactical structure is completely unfamiliar. Additionally, a parent or carer is more likely to dispute the content of a child’s statement as opposed to the grammar. For example, if in the example above, the child’s friends actually lived in Scotland, not Ireland, the parent would be more likely to correct this than the grammatical mistakes highlighted above. Furthermore, possibly one of the most important pieces of evidence to disprove this theory is that of virtuous errors a child makes when he or she is first learning to apply grammatical rules. For example, a child might say “I thinked” or “I runned”, because the usual ending for an English verb in the simple past tense is “-ed”. They certainly would not have heard this kind of error from a parent or carer, disputing the idea that language is merely learned through repetition and not through any form of innate ability whatsoever.
