"How has an interdisciplinary approach assisted in the understanding of human language

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Student number. 0465802/1        Assignment number. PSB1701R

“How has an interdisciplinary approach assisted in the understanding of human language?”    1,548 words excluding references.

All perspectives provide a guide and include more than one distinct theory but within an approach they share certain basic principles and assumptions which give them a distinct ‘flavour’ or identity, The Behaviourist approach studied observable behaviour, and rejected introspection for being to subjective John Watson changed psychology with his belief in empirical methods which became a main feature of mainstream psychology. Behaviourists focus on the role of the environment influencing behaviour and dismiss innate or inherited factors, their investigations into learning are conditioning either classical or operant [instrumental]. Evolutionary psychology follows two ‘broad assumptions about human beings’ firstly human nature does not exist at all and if it did it barely makes much difference to people’s social lives, or social behaviour can only be explained in terms of culture, social roles and socialization, like most modern biologists and social scientists, evolutionary psychologists argue that ‘nature or nurture’ is a false dichotomy and they distinguish themselves from behaviour  geneticists.  The cognitive approach is not as definable as other perspectives the human brain is unlike any other organ in the body and memory, speech and thinking processes are not observable externally that is why cognitive psychologists use metaphors and analogies to describe mental processes. Behaviourism began in America and much of this work is owed to John Watson but later influenced another learning theorist called B.F.Skinner, experiments were used incorporating rats and pigeons that were trained in making simple responses such as pushing a lever or pecking at a disc, this became known as ‘operant conditioning’ these experiments proved that a link was achieved by stimulus response reinforcement, Skinner compared this study to the learning behaviour of young children which involved parental encouragement that provided the reinforcement for uttering certain sounds, Skinner believed that with all verbal behaviour there are three important events, he called it the ‘Three Term Contingency. Gross. Pg. 13,20,25. Principles of developmental Psychology. Pg. 120-121.

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Chomsky {1975} et al believed that human language was assisted by the social environment, but this explanation alone was not enough he argued that children have an innate ability to formulating and understanding all types of language they had never heard before which he named ‘LAD’. Language acquisition device, he recognized that there were common linguistic features inherent in all languages and that children were already capable of finding them, these common linguistic features are consonants, vowels, syllables and modifiers {linguistic universals}. These features are at the core of all languages, and enables young children to ...

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