Chomsky and Skinner and Theories Of Language Development Many psychologists have studied and researched into how we acquire language. Some have concluded that the ability to learn language is a genetically inherited skill. Others believe that language is learned following birth and is due to environmental factors. This is part of the nature vs. nurture debate. One of the main psychologists who supported the nurture side was B.F Skinner. Skinner is an empiricist. He put forward the idea that children learn language because of the influence of the environment. Skinner believed that parents would provide more attention and pleasurable reactions when the infant made correct sounds or utterances. This way the child would gradually learn to speak and use language. The child would respond to the smiles and approval of the parents. Skinner explained this as operant conditioning; the reinforcement of a random response by a reward. By trial and error the child would learn to communicate. The child would repeat verbal behaviour that was rewarded and drop sounds or speech that did not work in terms of getting a pleasurable response. This is selective reinforcement. Pavlov and his dogs were and excellent example of operant conditioning. Pavlov rang a bell when it was time for the dogs to eat; eventually the dogs associated the bell with food. Each time the bell rang the dogs salivated. On the other hand, N.Chomsky who was a nativist argued that children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD). This meant that humans have a built in mechanism to help them recognise and speak language. Chomsky believed that children simply neede... ... middle of paper ... ...rmal language acquisition early in life. q Sachs reported the case of Jim, whose parents deaf but who was surrounded by spoken language from the television and radio in the hope that he would learn normal language. Jim showed no signs of learning language until a speech therapist took up his case at the age of three. Without the human interaction with the speech therapist there was no sign that Jim would have learned to speak. He needed the interaction before his language ability could develop. q If language development was innate, surely it would develop soon after we are able to control our voices, which is soon after one year of age. It does not explain why language takes a few years to develop. q Chomsky's theory also doesn't explain why there are such large variations in the rate children learn language.
The discussion as to whether nature or nurture were the driving force shaping our cognitive abilities, was for a long time considered interminable. In the 18th century, Locke and the English empiricists claimed that individuals were born with a tabula rasa and only experience could establish mind, consciousness and the self. On the continent, Leibniz envisaged the self as a monad carrying with it some knowledge of a basic understanding of the world. Until the 1960s, this dispute was still very vivid in the behavioral sciences: B. F. Skinner's school of behaviorism in the USA postulated (as reflexology did earlier) general rules for all types of learning, neglecting innate differences or predispositions. K. Lorenz was one of the protagonists of ethology in Europe, focusing on the inherited aspects of behavior. It was Lorenz who ended the antagonistic view of behavior in showing that there indeed are innate differences and predispositions in behavior where only little learning occurs. Today, it is largely agreed upon that nature and nurture are intimately cooperating to bring about adaptive behaviors. Probably only in very few cases ontogenetic programs are not subjected to behavioral plasticity at all. Conversely, the possibility to acquire behavioral traits has to be genetically coded for.
Children encompass the ability to learn whichever language system they are introduced to, therefore a newborn would learn the fictional Klingon language (Hoff, 2006). Klingon is not a natural language such as English or Spanish, and does not adhere to all the rules of a natural language. Due to this issue, the child would encounter problems in saying everyday terms in Klingon. Also, since Klingon is a fictional language and not spoken in society the child would not be able to communicate with others, which may cause the child to reject this fictional language. This rejection may be related to the lack of acceptance of this fictional language in society. This could constrain the child’s ability to learn a new language in which he/she can actively communicate with the people around him/her therefore, I would not advise a mother to teach her child Klingon, even though the child has the ability to learn the fictional language.
When most people think of the process of language development in “normal” children, the concepts that come to mind are of babies imitating, picking up sounds and words from the speakers around them. Trying to imagine that a child who cannot hear one single sound a person makes can learn to speak a language is absolutely fascinating. These children range from amazin...
Connor’s language development was very similar to his peers being they spoke in clear, short sentences, usually as statements, like “I want more cheese” or “yes, please”. Vygotsky says that around the age of three or four, children use the language they established to categorize their thoughts in social situations (Steinberg et al., 2011, p. 209). According to Vygotsky, Connor language skills are normative for his age and gender, when he said “read me a story” he had to organize his thoughts and decipher what he wanted then articulate them to the adult. As far as nonverbal communication, he made eye contact with the teacher when he asked her to read him a story and he sat upright in his chair showing that he was interested and attentive.
Neuronal plasticity found in infants, and the learning process has been of keen interest to neurobiologists for some time. How does the brain develop and attain the skills we need as one grows is fascinating. It is commonly understood that a crying infant can only be consoled by his/her mother, and is able to recognize her voice over the voice of a stranger. A number of studies have also been done on the distinct reaction of infants to sounds of their own language versus a foreign language, familiar melodies or fragments of stories they may have heard repeatedly during the fetus stage (Partanen et. al, 2013). However, these studies relied heavily on the infant’s reactions, which bared little credibility (Skwarecki, 2013). One research team developed a technique to show that infants actually develop memory of the sounds they hear while in the womb, and are able to recognize the similar sounds at the time of birth. The team was able to trace changes in brain activity in new born infants, and thus provided quantitative evidence that memory forms before birth (Partanen et. al, 2013). This paper begins by examining the literature that identifies associations between MMR used as a tool to measure auditory input and Exposure to Psuedoword and how its varations create memory traces.
This essay is about a child’s development and learning, focusing primarily on language development. It will describe the main stages of developmental "milestones" and the key concepts involved for children to develop their language skills, discussing language acquisition and social learning theory. The essay will also look into the key theorists involved in language development, primarily Vygotsky and Chomsky, and how these theories have had an impact on the way society views language and their implementation within schools. The essay will describe the factors affecting language development, both biological and environmental. While also discussing key arguments among theorists, one being the nature vs nurture debate, and how these play a part in the teaching in schools.
When infants are acquiring their first language, adults speak to them differently than they would speak to other adults. This kind of speech is formally named “Infant-Directed speech”, but is also referred to as “baby talk” and “motherese”. Infant-Directed (ID) speech has several properties that distinguish it from Adult-Directed (AD) speech. There is a debate over whether or not ID speech helps infants acquire language or is a hindrance in their language acquisition process Several experiments have been performed to test the effect of ID speech on infants’ language learning. These experiments all used different properties of ID speech. Overall, the experiments have proved that ID speech helps infants acquire language better than AD speech for different reasons. Further studies can be performed on ID speech to learn more about its effects on second language acquisition and on different ages.
“We can know so much because in a sense we already knew it” (Chomsky, 1976 p.7). Within this quote are the foundations for Chomsky’s theory of an innate predisposition to learn language by his imagination of a mind that holds a priori knowledge. It is suggested by Chomsky (1976) that this innate knowledge is within the human mind at birth and is unlocked by experience. Essentially, Chomsky’s argument is that there is some sort of biological basis only evident within humans that permits the acquisition of language across different cultures, notwithstanding the complexities or differences between them. Christiansen and Chater (2008) provide for Chomsky’s position by noting that children can obtain their native language before being able to carry out tasks such as tying laces or riding a bicycle.
There are three main theories of child language acquisition; Cognitive Theory, Imitation and Positive Reinforcement, and Innateness of Certain Linguistic Features (Linguistics 201). All three theories offer a substantial amount of proof and experiments, but none of them have been proven entirely correct. The search for how children acquire their native language in such a short period of time has been studied for many centuries. In a changing world, it is difficult to pinpoint any definite specifics of language because of the diversity and modification throughout thousands of millions of years.
To continue with the key features, language is known to be special because of how children are able to learn in ways that are different from learning other things. (Willingham, 2007). Strong evidence shows how prepared the human brain is to learn language with very little stimulation. The results that show this point of view to be true is known to be the worldwide consistency of language learning.
Child development language is a process by which children come to communicate and understand language during early childhood. This usually occurs from birth up to the age of five. The rate of development is usually fast during this period. However, the pace and age of language development vary greatly among children. Thus, the language development of a child is usually compared with norms rather than with other individual children. It is scientifically proven that development of girls language is usually at a faster rate than that of boys. (Berk, 2010) In other terms language development is also a crucial factor that reflects the growth and maturation of the brain. However, this development usually retards after the age of five making it very difficult for most children to continue learning language. There are two major types of language development in children. These include referential and expressive language development styles. In referential language development, children often first speak single words and then join the words together, first into –word sentences and then into th...
In her article, “Babies Prove Sound Learners,” Sohn (2008) states, “Such studies show that, up to about 6 months of age, babies can recognize all the sounds that make up all the languages in the world” (para.24). B. K. Skinner suggests that the materialization of language is the result of imitation and reinforcement. According to Craig and Dunn (2010), “Language development is linked to cognitive development that, in turn, depends on the development of the brain, on physical and perceptual abilities, and on experiences. Biological and social factors also jointly influence the early development of emotion and personality” (p. 117). In her article, A natural history of early language experience.
In the last few decades, the notion of language and brain has been highlighted in different scientific fields such as: neurology, cognitive science, linguistics biology, technology and finally education.
Still today, it is the commonly held belief that children acquire their mother tongue through imitation of the parents, caregivers or the people in their environment. Linguists too had the same conviction until 1957, when a then relatively unknown man, A. Noam Chomsky, propounded his theory that the capacity to acquire language is in fact innate. This revolutionized the study of language acquisition, and after a brief period of controversy upon the publication of his book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, in 1964, his theories are now generally accepted as largely true. As a consequence, he was responsible for the emergence of a new field during the 1960s, Developmental Psycholinguistics, which deals with children’s first language acquisition. He was not the first to question our hitherto mute acceptance of a debatable concept – long before, Plato wondered how children could possibly acquire so complex a skill as language with so little experience of life. Experiments have clearly identified an ability to discern syntactical nuances in very young infants, although they are still at the pre-linguistic stage. Children of three, however, are able to manipulate very complicated syntactical sentences, although they are unable to tie their own shoelaces, for example. Indeed, language is not a skill such as many others, like learning to drive or perform mathematical operations – it cannot be taught as such in these early stages. Rather, it is the acquisition of language which fascinates linguists today, and how it is possible. Noam Chomsky turned the world’s eyes to this enigmatic question at a time when it was assumed to have a deceptively simple explanation.
A linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Chomsky, declared that we have the ability to learn language not only because somebody taught us, but also because we are born with the principles of language in our genes. Chomsky also said “We have language because of nature, not just nurture” (Everywhere Psychology, 2012). Chomsky was one of the people that believed Genie still had a chance to learn language since everybody is born with the ability to learn. A neuropsychologist named Eric Lenneberg, agreed with Chomsky about humans being born with the ability to learn a language as nature, but believed there is a deadline for learning language. Lenneberg believed that if a first language isn 't learned by puberty it could be too late. What Lenneberg proposed is called the "critical period hypothesis," (Everywhere Psychology,