Another theorist who is a firm advocate for nativism is Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s theory on language development takes place at birth as he believes that learning takes place through an innate brain mechanism, pre-programmed with the ability to acquire grammatical structures. He calls this the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). This means that he believes children are already born with the function to acquire language by themselves and aren’t reliant on social interactions in developing their language skills. Another nativist who supports Chomsky’s theory is Jerome Bruner, who proposes that there must be a Language Acquisition Support System (LASS) in place. To research his theory, Bruner studied the everyday life of a child, focussing particularly on the main, reoccurring events e.g. breakfast, bedtime, naps etc and looked at how carers make the interactions educationally predictable so that children can learn through routine. For example, a children’s game that Bruner suggests is highly educational is ‘Peek-A-Boo’ as it exercises some substantially important linguistic aspects such as turn-taking, formulaic utterances and syntax.
The game “Peek-A-Boo” would also be relevant to theorist Jean Piaget in testing ‘object permanence’, as the game implements that an object still exists even when it is no longer in sight.
Opposing Chomsky and Bruner’s views, B.F Skinner’s theory seems quite the reverse as he reflects that children imitate adults in their language and develop from positive reinforcement through attention and praise of naming the article in question correctly or from negative reinforcement concluding from not being understood accurately if at all, or being deprived of positive comments. Skinner’s views also oppose the findings of Jean Berko and Roger Brown (1960) stated earlier through their study on the child referring to a plastic fish as ‘fis’, as, if Skinner’s theory was applied then the child would have been able to imitate the adult’s pronunciation correctly.
However, in supporting Skinner’s beliefs; Lev Vygotsky, an early child development researcher, observed that children role-play adult behaviours, therefore in relation to this, illustrating that they watch, imitate and learn from adults and backing the behaviourist theory.
David Crystal, a linguist researcher, introduced the theory of children’s language developing in five stages. Crystal proposed that the first stage was where children began to start saying things was either if they; wanted something, wanted to get someone’s attention or wanted to draw attention to something.
Stage two is where the child begins using interrogatives to question things. At this stage children begin learning the characteristics of things and usually learn them in opposite pairs, for example, hot and cold, up and down etc.
By stage three, questions are a much larger part of speech and intonation is used to show that they are delivering an interrogative. The child generally refers to things in the past tense than things that are to happen in the future when speaking. Also at stage three the basic sentence structure has expanded, (subject – verb – object – adverb) as seen in sentences like: “You dry hands” and “A man dig down there” begin to appear and auxiliary verbs are used in sentences such as “I am going” and phrases like “on the table” (preposition – article – noun).
At stage four the child starts to; use increasingly complex sentence structures, explain things in their sentences, ask for explanations through the use of the word ‘why’ and make a wide range of requests (for example ‘shall I do it?’).
Crystal submits that after reaching stage five of language development children ‘regularly use language to do all the things that they need it for. They give information, asking and answering questions, requesting directly and indirectly, suggesting, offering, stating and expressing.’
A theorist whose studies are primarily based upon a child’s first words is Katherine Nelson (1973). Katherine Nelson identified four main, integral categories for a child’s first words, of which were; naming (things or people – sixty percent of a child’s first words), actions/events (the second largest group), describing/modifying things (the third largest group) and finally, personal/social words (accounting for approximately eight percent of the sample).
Taking into account all the theories present on children’s language development there are a lot of different views on how children acquire language and many support yet also contradict each other. In my personal opinion I believe that social interaction and imitation have a huge influence on an infant’s progression yet there are also many aspects that add to this to help children acquire language, even though I believe that social interaction is one of the strongest factors (my view is in relation to when adults learn a different language, as they learn through being taught and then putting their knowledge in to practise through social interaction).