UNIT III.

FIRST LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION

1. THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

A. BEHAVIORAL APPROACH
B. CHALLENGES TO BEHAVIORAL APPROACH
FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

FLA is instinctive as it requires no instruction. First language acquisition (FLA)

refers to acquiring one's first language without any instruction. It is an instinctive
process, and it starts at birth.

EXAMPLE:
 ILOCO/ ILOCANO
- The Ilocanos (Ilocano: Tattao nga Iloko/Ilokano), Ilokanos, or
Iloko people are the third largest Filipino ethnolinguistic group.
They mostly reside within the Ilocos Region, in the
northwestern seaboard of Luzon, Philippines. The native
language of the Ilocano people is the Ilocano (or Ilokano)
language.

Over the last fifty years, several theories have been put forward to explain
the process by which children learn to understand and speak a language.

Children have a remarkable ability to communicate:

 Small babies: children babble, cry and vocally and non -vocally send
messages and receive messages.
 End of first year: children start to imitate words and speech sounds and
about this time use their first words.
 18 months: their vocabulary in terms of words has increased and are
beginning to use 2-word 3-word utterances (known as “telegraphic
utterances”).
 3 years: Children can comprehend an incredible quantity of linguistic input,
they chatter nonstop
 School age: Children start to internalize increasingly complex structures,
expand their vocabulary and sharpen their communication skills and they
also learn the social functions of their language

Behavioristic Approach
- focuses on the idea that all behaviors are learned through
interaction with the environment. This learning theory states
that behaviors are learned from the environment, and says that
innate or inherited factors have very little influence on
behavior.
 - Behavioristic Approach , or behavioral learning theory is a
branch of psychology that focuses on how people learn through
their interactions with the environment. It is based on the idea
that all behaviors are acquired through conditioning, which is a
process of reinforcement and punishment
Characteristics:

 Children come into this world with a tabula rasa (a clean slate
bearing no preconceived notions about the world or about
language) and that these children are then shaped by the
environment and slowly conditioned through various schedules of
reinforcement.

 Language is a fundamental part of total human behavior.

 This approach focused on the immediately perceptible aspects of

linguistic behavior-the publicly observable responses-and the
relationships or associations between those responses and events
in the world surrounding them.
 A behaviorist might consider effective language behavior to be the
production of correct responses to stimuli. If a particular response is
reinforced, it then becomes habitual, or conditioned.
 This is true of their comprehension as well as production responses.

 The behaviorist view imitation and practice as primary processes

in language development.
- Imitation: Word for word repetition of all or part of
someone else utterance.
e.g. Mother: Would you like some bread and peanut
butter?
Katie: Some bread and peanut butter

- Practice: Repetitive manipulation of form.

e.g. Michel I can handle it.
Hannah can handle it.
We can handle it

1.Theories of Language Acquisition

 A. Behaviorist Theory

The theory of behaviorist language acquisition argues that children acquire

language only due to their own active experiences and not by imitation or
instruction. The theory is based on the idea that humans are unique in how they
think and learn about new information ()

Language acquisition begins when a child hears his/her caretaker say something
and then tries it several times until he/she finds out what particular thing in the
environment makes the caregiver communicate in such a way.

B.F. Skinner - Psychologist

Skinner's Theory of Learning: Operant Conditioning According to B. F.
Skinner's theory of learning, our behaviors are developed or conditioned through
reinforcements. He referred to this process as operant conditioning, with operant
referring to any behavior that acts on the environment and leads to
consequences.

 Operant conditioning was first described by behaviorist B.F. Skinner,

which is why you may occasionally hear it referred to as Skinnerian
conditioning. As a behaviorist, Skinner believed that it was not really
necessary to look at internal thoughts and motivations in order to explain
behavior. Instead, he suggested, we should look only at the external,
observable causes of human behavior. Skinner used the term operant to
refer to any "active behavior that operates upon the environment to
generate consequences." Skinner's theory explained how we acquire the
range of learned behaviors we exhibit every day.

 Operant conditioning relies on a fairly simple premise: Actions that are

followed by reinforcement will be strengthened and more likely to occur
again in the future. Operant conditioning, sometimes referred to as
instrumental conditioning, is a method of learning that employs rewards
and punishments for behavior. Through operant conditioning, an
association is made between a behavior and a consequence (whether
negative or positive) for that behavior.
Types of Conditioning According to B.F Skinner

 Reinforcement in Operant Conditioning - Reinforcement is any event

that
strengthens or increases the behavior it follows
 Positive Reinforcement - are favorable events or outcomes that are
presented after the behavior
Example:
- Clapping and cheering.
- Giving a high five.
- Giving a hug or pat on the back.
- Giving a thumbs-up.

 Negative reinforcement - involve the removal of an unfavorable events or

outcomes after the display of a behavior
Example:
- Giving a pass to the car behind to avoid its honking.
- Getting up from bed to avoid the noisy alarm.

 Punishment in Operant Conditioning - Punishment is the presentation of

an adverse event or outcome that causes a decrease in the behavior it
follows
 Positive Punishment - sometimes referred to as punishment by
application, presents an unfavorable event or outcome in order to weaken
the response it
follows.
Example:
- scolding a student to get the student to stop texting in class

 Negative punishment - also known as punishment by removal, occurs

when a favorable event or outcome is removed after a behavior occurs
Example:
 - Taking away a boy's recess privilege to stop his disruption.
- Giving the driver a parking ticket (taking away money) to stop his
illegal parking.
- A child's screen time is cut to stop his tantrum.
- Taking away a teenager's phone to stop the bad attitude.

Positive Reinforcement - Give good to increase behavior

Negative Reinforcement – Take bad to increase behavior
Positive Punishment – Give bad to decrease behavior
Negative Punishment- Take good to decrease behavior

Basic Principles of Behaviorist Theory

1. Behaviorist theory dwells on spoken language. That is, primary medium of

language is oral because we learn to speak before we learn to read and write.
Then, language is primarily what is spoken and secondarily what is written.
That’s why spoken language must have a priority in language teaching.
2. Behaviorist theory is the habit formation theory of language teaching and
learning, reminding us the learning of structural grammar. Language learning
concerns us by “not problem-solving but the information and performance of
habits.” In other words, language learning is a mechanical process leading the
learners to habit formation whose underlying scheme is the conditioned
reflex. Thus, it is definitely true that language is controlled by the
consequences of behavior.
3. The stimulus-response chain is a pure case of conditioning. Behaviorist
learning theory “emphasizes conditioning and building from the simplest
conditioned responses to more and more complex behaviors.”
4. All learning is the establishment of habits as the result of reinforcements and
reward. Positive reinforcement is a reward while negative reinforcement is
punishment. In a stimulus situation, a response is exerted, and if the response
is positively augmented by a reward, then the association between the
stimulus and response is itself reinforced and this the response will very
likely be manipulated by every appearance of stimulus. The result will yield
conditioning. When responses to stimuli are coherently reinforced, then habit
formation is established. It is because of this fact that this theory is termed
 habit-formation-by-reinforcement theory.
5. The learning, due to socially-conditioned nature, can be the same for each
individual. In other words, each person can learn equally if conditions in
which the learning takes place are the same for each person.

B. Challenges to Behavioral Approach

 Chomsky argues that the behaviorist theory fails to recognize what

has come to be called „the logical problem of language acquisition‟.
 This logical problem refers to the fact that children come to know
more about the structure of their language than they could reasonably
be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language which
they hear.
 Children do not learn and reproduce a large set of sentences, but they
routinely create new sentences that they have never learnt before.
 They internalize rules rather than strings of words (e.g. it breaked
/mommy goed).
 The language the child is exposed to in the environment is full of
confusing information. (e.g. false starts, incomplete sentences, or
slips of the tongue)
 Children are not systematically corrected or instructed on language
points. Parental corrections are inconsistent or even non-existent.
 When parents do correct, they tend to focus on meaning and truth
values and not on language itself.

References:
https://cdn.fbsbx.com/v/t59.2708
21/289423560_1039619220256337_717908951182010471_n.pdf/Module-
Theories-of-Language-Acquisition.pdf?_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7