Insights from
Developmental
Psychology:Focus
on the Child. "Do
children learn
language in the
same way they
learn other
things,such as how
to tie their shoes or
how to build with
blocks,or do
children have a
special cognitive
capacity for
language learning?
Insights from Sociology,Antropology,and
Education:Focus on the Environment.
Children develop the ability to understand
and produce language because language is
essential for social interaction.Communicative
competemce,the knowledge of what to say to
whom under what circustances.Language
always occurs in a social context, and the
meaning of many utterances depends on the
context.
Behaviorism Chonsky B.F.Skinner
behaviorism could not account for
learning in general.
Language is complex, and determining just
how it is that children develop the capacity
to understand and speak the language that
sorraunds them is no simple task.
Insights from Linguistics:Focus on the
Language Chonsky has observed that it is
necessary to develop a theory of
language before attempting to develop a
theory of language acquisition.He also
developed a theory referred to as
generative grammar because it is an
attempt to develop a small set of rules that
could be used to produce,or generate,any
sentence of the language.
Universal Grammar Chonsky's answer to the
question of how children acquire language is that
children have a innate capacity for
language,what he at first called language
acquisition device.
How children form Linguistic Rules Children do get evidence of
how language works from the models provided by the language
of adults and others around.Studies of child language acquisition
show that children develop the rules of language,quickly, they
acquire the language despite receiving only a limited amount of
input,and they do it without much correction.Children must have a
built-in capacity for language.
Children's Error Chonsky's claim that language is innate
comes from the fact that there are certain kinds of errors
that children never make.The fact that children never make
certain kind of errors suggests that children are born with
some innate knowledge of the rules of language,and their
language attempts never violate those basic rules.A child
may make mistakes with the parts of language that are
unpredictable,like regular verbs.But children dont make
mistakes in some areas where mistakes would be
expected.
Language and the Brain Linguists study language because it provides a
window on the mind.The best evidence that humans are born with an innate
knowledge of things like nouns and verbs is that all human languages have
something like nouns and verbs.The innate knowledge children have allows
them to undersatnd and produce sentences,but it doesn't allow them to
explain how they do it.The implicit nature of linguistic rules is not limited to
children.Many adults just know whether or not something sounds right,
eventhough they cant explain how they know.