theoretical approaches to first language aquisition

Theoretical approaches to first language acquisition

Presented by Hamdi Omaima

Content

I. Introduction II. Theories of first Language Acquisition1. The behaviourist prespective 2. The innatist prespective3. The interactional/developmental perspectives 4. ConnectionismIII. Language disorders and delays

Introduction

• Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words to communicate.

• First language acquisition refers to the child’s acquisition of his mother tongue, and how he comes to understand and speak the language of his community.

Theories of first Language Acquisition

The behaviourist perspective : • The Behaviorist perspective Learning is explained

in terms of imitation practice and reinforcement.

• Behaviourists view that children learn language through a process of stimulus (hearing) and response,in which they imitate sounds and practise what they hear. Thus,correct structures are positively reinforced and encouraged by their environment.

Examples of children’s speech

e.g 1: Lois: You’re gonna put more wheels in the dump truck

Peter:Dump truck.Wheels.Dump truk. children do not imitate adults’s speech in

the same way as parrots do. They imitate words selectively according to their own understandings of the sounds or patterns.

• e.g 2: Lois: Did you see the toys I brought ? Kathryn : I bring toys? Choo choo ? Lois brought the choo choo train?

In this case the child produce a series of related practise sentences and use language creatively without imitate the other’s speech.

The innatist perspective • Noam Chomsky is the best known and the most influential

American linguist of the second half of the Twentieth Century. He has made a number of strong claims about language.

• He argued that children are biologically programmed for language and that language develops in the child as well as the other biological functions develop.

To acquire language a child only needs the availability of people who speak to him.The child‘s biological endowment will do the rest.

Chomsky’s critical review of behaviourist theory

• Chomsky argued that Children’s minds are not blank slates to be filled by imitating language they hear in the environment.

• They 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.

• Chomsky suggests that language is an innate ability that is to say that human beings born with set of rules about language in the brains called the UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR.

• It is agreed by the most linguists that grammar is complex.

• Proponents of the innatist perspective argue that this complexity could never be learned purely on the basis of imitating and practising sentences available in the input.

Children must have some innate mechanism of knowledge that allows them to discover such complex syntax in spite of limitations of the input.

The Critical Period Hypothesis

The critical period hypothesis is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age.

• The hypothesis claims that there is an ideal time window to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which further language acquisition becomes much more difficult or impossible.

Interactionist/developmantal perspectives

Problems of Innatism • Too much emphasis on the final state, but not enough

on the developmental aspects of language acquisition.

• Language is one manifestation of the cognitive and affective ability to deal with the world .

• Cognitive psychologists view that language acquisition is an example of child’s ability to learn from experience.

Piaget:• He placed the acquisition of first language within the

context of child's mental or cognitive development.• he trace the development of children's cognitive

understanding such as object permanence,stability of quantity and logical inferencing ect..

Language can be used to represent knowledge that children have acquired through physical interaction with the enviroment.

Vygotsky : • He observed that the interaction among children and also

between children and adults is important in the development of language.

• He argued that language develops primarily from social interaction.

• A supportive interactive environment enables children to advance to a higher level ok knowledge.Than they would be able to do independentaly as the ZPD.

The imporatance of interaction: • Social interactions between a language-learning child

and an interlocutor play an important role in development of language skills.

• This role is illuminated by cases where such interaction is missing.

• A child called Jim was a hearing child of deaf parents,his only contact with oral language was through television.

• He did not begin his linguistic development in a normal enviroment in which a parent communicated with him in either oral or sign language.

Connectionism

• Connectionists hypothesize that language acquisition dose not require a separate “module of the mind” but can be explained in terms of learning in general.

• They argue that what children need to know is essentially available in the language they are exposed to.

• Connectionism views language as a complex system of units which become interconnected in the mind as they are encountered together. The more often units are heard or seen together, the more likely it is that the presence of one will lead to the activation of the other.

• Language acquisition is not just a process of associating words with elements of external reality. It is also a process of associating words and phrases with the other words and phrases that occur with them, or words with grammatical morphemes that occur with them.

Language disorders and delays• Language disorders or language impairments are disorders

that involve the processing of linguistic information.

• Problems that may be experienced can involve grammar (syntax),semantics (meaning), or other aspects of language.

• Types of this disability can include:deafness,artticulatory problems and dyslexia.