MAED English

Theories of the early stages of language acquisition

What is language?

 Language is the primary method of human communication, but there are also other
ways to communicate without the use of language. When asked to define language we
tend to think of a verbal and written system in which certain sounds and symbols come
together in a specific way to convey meaning. Language in its most complex form is
unique to humans, although some animals have been found to have basic
communication patterns. Languages often have verbal and written components, but
how we classify something like American Sign Language? Animals manage to
communicate — do they have language? How did language evolve? How do we learn
enough language ourselves to begin to answer this question?
Why is it so surprising that we can learn language?
 If you’ve ever tried to learn a new language, you know it’s not easy. There are new rules
of grammar which come with many exceptions, new sounds that are hard to make,
endless lists of vocabulary to commit to memory and so on. And yet, you managed to
learn the basics of your very first language around the time you were two years old; no
textbooks in sight.
 Not only are children able to absorb the complicated rules of grammar without formal
teaching, they do so from a limited vocabulary. Regardless of how much a child is
spoken to, they will not hear every possible word and sentence by the time they begin
speaking. Yet when they do start to talk, children begin to follow grammatical rules and
apply them to form new, innovative phrases. This level of information processing is
incredibly impressive in anyone, much less someone still figuring out counting and
skipping!
 What do we know?
 As is often the case in psychology and sociology, it’s hard to get what we normally think
of as data about language acquisition. It’s not a chemical we can test for or a distance
we can measure (imagine asking a 2 year old how many words they know — not a
particularly useful or productive task, right? ). However, there are some facts that are
generally agreed upon by the scientific community. The first couple years of life are the
critical period for language learning, which becomes a much harder task as people age.
Children usually say their first words around 10-18 months of age, and graduate to
phrases sometime before they are two years old. In fact, studies have shown that 18
month olds can tell the difference between correctly formed verb pairs (is jumping) and
incorrect ones (will jumping). Somewhere between four and seven years old children
begin to be able to tell stories that more or less make sense.
 We also know that learning a language is not like walking up the steady increase of a
ramp, but more like walking the hills and valleys of a country road. Usually when we
learn a new skill, the more we practice the better we get. However, this isn’t always true
in the early stages of language development. When children are first learning to talk, the
verbs they use are usually the most common such as go, eat, talk, give, run, etc. These
are often irregular in the past tense. Although at first they use the past tense properly
(“I ran”, “he went”, etc), kids typically regress for a while. They often over-follow rules,
saying phrases like “I runned” instead of “I ran”. As their vocabularies expand rapidly
(known as vocabulary burst), some researchers believe children notice patterns in
language, and that leads to over-correction as described in the example above.
Eventually, children begin to understand where the rules apply and where they don’t,
and then properly form the past tense once more. This is known as a U shaped learning
curve, because the language mastery started high, dropped for a period of time, and
then improved again. Thus, there appears to be a mimicking (copying) phase first and
then a time of broad generalizations before children settle into language.
What are the major theories about language acquisition?
 The most well-known theory about language acquisition is the nativist theory, which
suggests that we are born with something in our genes that allows us to learn
language. It proposes that there is a theoretical language acquisition device (LAD)
somewhere in our brains that is responsible for learning a language the same way
the hypothalamus is responsible for maintaining your body temperature. If language
was partly biological, it could explain why humans seem to have far more
complicated communication patterns than any other species.
 Although no physical “language organ” exists in the brain, language acquisition can
be hampered if certain parts of the brain are damaged during critical periods of
language development. Damage to the left hemisphere, for example can lead to
aphasia - a disorder which causes problems with language, while leaving intelligence
untouched. For example, in Wernicke’s aphasia, patients with damage in a certain
region of the brain can no longer understand language. Although they can still form
normal sentences, neither what they say nor the words of others make any sense to
them. Patients with Broca’s aphasia on the other hand, have problems forming
language but no trouble understanding what is said to them. Studies have shown
that young children with damage in similar regions of the brain can actually grow up
 with only slightly impaired language ability - implying that the brain can develop new
language pathways that are good, but not quite as good as the original (Reilly, 1998).
 Nativist theory also suggests that there is a universal grammar that is shared across
differing languages, because this grammar is part of our genetic make-up. The
majority of world languages have verbs and nouns, although this is not true in every
instance, as well as similar ways to structure thoughts. Language is thought of as
having a finite amount of rules from which we can build an infinite amount of
phrases, and the core of these rules is somehow programmed into our brains. This is
an ideal theory for explaining how young children can learn such complicated ideas
so quickly, or why there are so many similarities in language around the world. This
theory is comparable to how we think of numbers; regardless of cultural
background, math always works the same way.
 Another way to look at language learning is to treat it like learning a new skill. The
learning theory of language acquisition suggests that children learn a language much
like they learn to tie their shoes or how to count; through repetition and
reinforcement. When babies first learn to babble, parents and guardians smile, coo,
and hug them for this behavior. As they grow older, children are praised for speaking
properly and corrected when they misspeak. Thus, language arises from stimuli and
stimuli response. While this is logical, it fails to explain how new words or phrases
come about, since children are only parroting the things they have heard from
others.
 The interactionist approach (sociocultural theory) combines ideas from sociology
and biology to explain how language is developed. According to this theory, children
learn language out of a desire to communicate with the world around them.
Language emerges from, and is dependent upon, social interaction. The
Interactionist approach claims that if our language ability develops out of a desire to
communicate, then language is dependent upon whom we want to communicate
with. This means the environment you grow up in will heavily affect how well and
how quickly you learn to talk. For example, infants being raised by only their mother
 are more likely to learn the word “mama”, and less likely to develop “dada”. Among
the first words we learn are ways to demand attention or food. If you’ve ever tried
to learn a new language, you may recognize this theory’s influence. Language classes
often teach commonly used vocabulary and phrases first, and then focus on building
conversations rather than simple rote memorization. Even when we expand our
vocabularies in our native language, we remember the words we use the most.
 It’s important to keep in mind that theories of language acquisition are just ideas
created by researchers to explain their observations. How accurate these theories
are to the real world is debatable. Language acquisition is a complicated process
influenced by the genetics of an individual as well as the environment they live in.

How do scientists today study language learning?

 Many of these theories initially came about as a result of what is called “armchair
psychology”; that is, sitting and thinking about a problem. It is extremely difficult to
collect objective and accurate data on what’s going on in the brain in terms of its direct
relationship to a behavior such as language. That said, some computational models of
language acquisition have been gaining traction in the past several decades. A
computational model is a mathematical way to recreate complicated systems we see
every day; from how water flows in a river, to how children learn languages. The model
is built to represent the way we think something happens. For example, in the model of
the learning theory approach, a word would be learned faster if it came up a lot or the
subject received a lot of input about it. Then, linguists change how different variables
work to see what affect that would have on the system. If the model behaves and
“learns” the same way that we do, it’s a good sign that the model is on the right track.
These models have helped to identify and measure linguistical features such as the
critical period for language learning, the vocabulary burst, and the U-shaped learning
mentioned earlier.
 New brain imaging technology, such as MRIs and fMRIs have also allowed scientists to
look at the brains of children and patients with language-acquisition disorders to
understand this complicated event. An fMRI can track where and when our brains use
 energy. If a certain part of your brain lights up while you’re learning a language, that
part of your brain is using energy, and in this context might be related to language-
acquisition. Of course we learn over time and not all at once, so there is a limit to what
we can learn via imaging which represents the brain in a single moment.
 While we still have a ways to go before we completely understand how we learn a
language, we definitely know enough to know that it’s a pretty incredible feat. So give
yourself a well-deserved pat on the back and just remember that the phrase “it’s so
easy, a child could do it!” doesn’t always apply.