LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

NAJM 4130
LECTURE 4

INSTRUCTOR: MOHAMMED AL ZANNAN

 THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO L1
ACQUISITION
1) Behaviorism: Say what I say

2) Innatism: It’s all in your mind

3)Interactionist/Developmental perspectives:

Learning from inside and out

Bibliography: Lightbown, Patsy. Spada, Nina. “How languages are learned” 1993
2) INNATISM: IT’S ALL IN
YOUR MIND
Chomsky (1959) argues that
behaviorism cannot provide
sufficient explanations for
children’s language acquisition
for the following reasons:
 –Children come to know more
about the structure of their
language than they could be
expected to learn on the basis of
the samples of language they hear.
– The language children are exposed
to includes false starts,
incomplete
sentences and slips of the tongue, and
yet they learn to distinguish between
grammatical and ungrammatical
sentences.
– Children are by no means
systematically corrected or instructed
on language by parents.
 IN THE
Children are SAME WAY
biologically Language OF OTHER
programmed develops in BIOLOGIC
for language the child AL
FUNCTION
S
 LEARNIN
language
G TO
acquisition
WALK.
 LAD: LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION DEVICE
( OR BLACK BOX)
– It contains all and only the principles which are
universal to all human languages
(i.e.. Universal Grammar – UG).
 If children are pre-
equipped with UG.

What they have to learn is

The ways in which their

own language make use
of those principles
 They
By matching
children need discover the the innate
access only to structure of knowledge of
samples of a the language basic
natural to be grammatical
language learned principles (UG)

which serve
Once the to the structures
of the particular
as a trigger LAD is language in the
to activate
the device. activated environment.
 CONCLUSION

• Children’s acquisition of grammatical rules is

guided by principles of an innate UG
which could apply to all languages.

• Children “know” certain things of the

language just by being exposed to a
limited number of samples.
EVIDENCE USED TO SUPPORT
CHOMSKY’S INNATIST
POSITION:
Virtually all children
successfully learn their native language at
a time in life
when they would not be expected to
learn anything else so complicated
(i.e. biologically programmed).
 –Language is separate from
other aspects of cognitive
developments
(e.g., creativity and social grace)
and may be located in a different
“module" of the brain.
 The language children are
exposed to does not contain
examples
of all the linguistic rules and
patterns.
 Animals cannot learn
to manipulate a symbol system as
complicated as
the natural language
of a 3- or 4-year-old child.
Children acquire grammatical

rules without getting explicit

instruction.
 THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR THE
INNATIST POSITION:
The Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) –Lenneberg:
• There is a specific and limited time period
(i.e., “critical period”) for the LAD to
work
successfully.

• Only when it is
stimulated at the
right time
 ONLY BY
STRONG
PUBERTY
Two versions
AFTER PUBERTY
IT WILL BE MORE
WEA
DIFFICULT AND
K INCOMPLETE
VIRTUALLY EVERY CHILD LEARNS
LANGUAGE ON A SIMILAR
SCHEDULE IN SPITE OF DIFFERENT
ENVIRONMENTS.
– Three case studies of abnormal language
development - evidence of the CPH
• Victor – a boy of about 12 years old
(1799)
• Genie – a girl of 13 years old (1970)
• Deaf signers (native signers, early
learners, vs. late learners)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTFCiG
I5wJA
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Oavg
lDkn0&feature=related
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tchn_
DXs4o&feature=related
Problems of Innatism:

Too much emphasis on

the “final state”
but not enough on the
developmental aspects of
language acquisition.
 •Language was
ONE manifestation
of the cognitive and affective ability
to deal with the world

• Innatists
dealt with FORMS of the language,
not with the FUNCTIONAL levels of
meaning constructed from SOCIAL
INTERACTION