LANGUAGE LEARNING IN

EARLY CHILDHOOD
ADQUISICIÓN DEL INGLÉS COMO LENGUA EXTRANJERA

UNED
SONIA MUÑOZ GÓMEZ
76429506t
 1. INTRODUCTION

The present paper offers a review of the most prominent and influential theories
regarding First Language Acquisition and its potential applications in language teaching.
As we will see, many of these theories contradict themselves, while others seem to
complement each other. Although the field has witnessed an incredible growth of studies
and researches in the last few decades, we are yet far from an accurate description of the
way humans develop language, mainly due to the fact that researchers are very limited
when it comes to demonstrate any given theory. However, important efforts have been
made in order to figure out how these theories could help other fields of knowledge such
as speech therapy or pedagogy, in some cases with impressive positive results.

2. FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

a. Theoretical Framework for First Language Acquisition

The development of the human language -and the nature of language in general- has
amazed scholars since the beginning of times, from Aristotle and Plato to modern
thinkers. For instance, philosopher Descartes (1637/1960) wrote:

For it is a very remarkable thing that there are no men, not even the insane, so dull and
stupid that they cannot put words together in a manner to convey their thoughts. On the
contrary, there is no other animal however perfect and fortunately situated it may be, that can
do the same. (p.42).

Most remarkable, in 1690 John Locke’s Essay on human Understanding would

popularize the notion of tabula rasa -or ‘blank slate’ as the term is often referred to in
English-, whereby he proposed his view of human’s mind as an empty ‘blackboard’ at
the time of being born. He argued that all types of learning, including language, departs
from this blank slate to the achievement of complete knowledge by means of sensorial
experience only. Although the concept of the blank slate was developed in Locke’s work
as a philosophical concept, the notion would be later rescued by different modern
linguistic and psychological approaches as one of the possible explanations to language
acquisition. As we shall see in the following section, the debate of whether first language
acquisition is the result of experience or, on the contrary, to what extent there exist any
sort of innatism involved, would mark the path of modern linguistics.

Behaviorism

In1913 psychologist John B. Watson published his influential article ‘Psychology as

the Behaviorist Views It’, were he postulated the foundations of Behaviorism. In his
article, Watson claimed that psychologists should dismiss the focus on cognitive
processes or mental events and shift towards observable behavior only. Behaviorists as
defined by Watson stand for the idea that there is not a difference in the learning process
of humans to that of animals, and that such learning process is achieved by means of
stimuli and its responses.

Behaviorism’s postulations were of major importance not only in psychology.

Following the behaviorist approach, in 1957 B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior came out.
For Skinner, language learning is no different to other types of learning. Following the
aforementioned notion of tabula rasa spreaded by Locke, Skinner conceived the human’s
mind as a blank slate at the time of being born, which by means of imitation, association
and reinforcement individuals finally achieve the learning of their mother tongues. This
reinforcement is embodied in the feedback provided by adults: when a child produces a
grammatically ill-formed sentence, negative feedback will be provided by his/her
caregivers, so he/she won’t repeat it in the future. In Skinner’s (1957) words,

In teaching the young child to talk, the formal specifications upon which
reinforcement is contingent are at first greatly relaxed. Any response which vaguely
resembles the standard behavior of the community is reinforced. When these begin to
appear frequently, a closer approximation is insisted upon. In this manner, very complex
verbal forms may be reached. (pp. 29-30).

Skinner’s theories about language learning were largely influential in the linguistic
community. His conception of language as any other human behavior that is to be learned
like any other skill was put into practice and led to the well-known ‘audio-lingual
method’, a grammar-focused method based on the assumptions that learners would better
success in learning a foreign language when positive and negative reinforcement are
given.
Innatism

From the 1950s onwards the world of disciplines such as psychology, philosophy or
linguistics changed so dramatically that the period became known as the ‘cognitive
revolution’ era. The influence of cognitive sciences and the prominence of the new
emerging fields such as computational linguistics largely contributed to the
interdisciplinarity among the different fields of knowledge.

The end of the decade is undoubtedly marked by the irruption into scene of the figure
of Noam Chomsky. In 1957 he published Syntactic Structures, a groundbreaking work
that marked a before and an after in the linguistic sphere. This influential work introduced
a new conception of grammar as independent of meaning, which he demonstrated by
means of the famous sentence ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’, arguing that any
native speaker of the English language would consider it as grammatically correct, but
which makes no sense (Chomsky, 1957).

More relevant to the language acquisition matter was his work A Review of
Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, first published in 1959 and where he effusively rejects
Skinner’s theories about language learning. For Chomsky, language is not ‘learnable’ but
is rather ‘acquired’. As López Ornat and Gallo (2004) summarizes, Chomsky’s
conception of language is unlearnable because:

1. Language is a surprisingly early acquisition that, nevertheless, involves

building a complex formal system (grammar). And this is performed by a cognitive
system that is still prelogical and preoperative.
2. Language is acquired with no apparent effort.
3. Language is acquired without any explicit instruction, that is, nobody teaches
the child to talk.
4. Language is acquired despite “stimulus poverty.” Grammatical information is
not found explicitly in the stimulus input and, in addition, this input contains informative
noise, interruptions, differences between speakers, and is grammatically incomplete.
(p.162).

From the time being, the term ‘acquisition’ would be used to refer to the process
of assimilation and ‘internalization’ of a language as opposed to ‘learning’, the conscious
study of grammatical, phonological, morphological, etc. rules that makes up a given
language. The fact that language is not ‘learned’ but ‘acquired’ takes us to another
important aspect of Chomsky’s perspective, that is, that the human’s mind is no longer
seen as a tabula rasa, but instead children are born with what he labelled ‘Universal
Grammar’ (UG). This theory implies that the human’s faculty of acquiring a language is
innate, that is, it is present in children’s brain before being born. The principles of
universal grammar would be stored in a theoretical item inside the human’s mind known
as the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). As Lightbown and Spada (2013) summarize:

Chomsky argued that the behaviourist theory failed to account far ‘the logical
problem of language acquisition’ -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 they hear. The language children are exposed to includes false
starts, incomplete sentences, and slips of the tangue, and yet they learn to distinguish
between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. He concluded that children’s minds
are not blank states to be filled by imitating language they hear in the environment.
Instead, he hypothesized, children are born with specific innate ability to discover far
themselves the underlying rules of a language system on the basis of the samples of a
natural language they are exposed to. This innate endowment was seen as a sort of
templare, containing the principles that are universal to all human languages. This
universal grammar (UG) would prevent the child from pursuing all sorts of wrong
hypotheses about how language systems might work. If children are pre-equipped with
UG, then, what they have to learn is the ways in which the language they are acquiring
makes use of these principles. (p20).

When Chomsky’s notion of innatism were put into test, results seemed to prove
him right. For instance, De Casper and Spence (1986) carried out a study where a group
of mothers-to-be were asked to read aloud the same book during the final stage of their
pregnancy. After the babies were born, these showed signs of recognizing as familiar
what they were listening to when their mothers were asked to read the same book again.

However, Chomsky’s perspective is not free from criticism and the principles of
generative grammar -as the approach is commonly known- has been challenged over the
last decades of the twentieth century. For instance, scholars that place themselves within
the scope of Corpus Linguistics usually attack the lack of attention given in the
Chomskyan perspective to real-world speech acts, as Chomsky’s theoretical conception
of language focuses on grammar rules and disregards other aspects such as pragmatics or
semantics.

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Further contemporary linguists such as Jean Piaget or Hermine Sinclair dismissed

the idea of any innately specific skill that serves as the means to achieve the acquisition
of languages, and provided a model based on cognitive development. Both Piaget and
Chomsky agreed with the presence of a genetic innatism in children, but while Chomsky
defended that this innatism is specially designed for language acquisition, Piaget makes
no distinction between language and other types of cognitive development processes.

Piaget’s (1960) ‘Theory of Cognitive Development’ describes the process of

language acquisition in four stages, these coinciding with the biological and
psychological development of the child and thus closely linked to other developmental
aspects such as behavior. These four steps are:

- Sensori-motor Stage: children from 0 to 2 years depend on their

sensorial abilities in order to develop cognition. By interacting with the
physical world around them, children are able to build knowledge from
instinctual mechanism to symbolic thinking.
- Preoperational Stage: The symbolic thinking that started in the first
stage is increasingly developed through the following years. Children
turn from their highly sensorial dependence to mental actions. These,
however, are limited; for instance, children up to 7 years will be able
to understand a mathematical operation such as 7 + 4 = 11 but won’t
be able to do so in reverse (4 + 7 = 11).
- Concrete Operations Stage: Children from 7 to 11 years learn the basis
for classification and seriation, as well as the further development of
symbolic thinking and the understanding of processes such as
transformation.
- Formal Operational Stage: From 11 years old onwards,
children develop abstract thinking, which enables them to solve
problems by hypothesizing and reasoning. For when they reach
adulthood, they are already able to think in logically and idealistically.
 Cognitive models like Piaget’s defend the notion that, as soon as children first
start to be aware of concrete concepts of the real world, they acquire the patterns and
skills to organize and transform such concepts into language. Piaget’s model for
explaining human cognition in terms of development largely influenced the scope of
education, and its implications still remain in force at present days.

Vygotsky’s Social Interactional Theory

From Vygotsky’s point of view, the study and understanding of language

acquisition should be approached by focusing on the child’s environment and his/her
interactions with other children and adults. Since the purpose of language is no other than
communication, it is by means of observing interactions and conversations among
children and their caregivers that we can shed light on the basis of how children acquire
language.

One of the major contributions of Vygotsky to the field was the introduction of
the notion of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which refers to the distance
between what children are already capable of by their own and what they are capable of
with the help of an adult. The concept was later further developed and applied to
educational contexts leading to the term ‘scaffolding’, which is commonly used to refer
to the input that makes the child capable of achieving a goal that would at first surpass
his skills, in order to draw on their knowledge to acquire new knowledge. For instance, it
is a usual practice among language teachers to provide students with cues and the insights
they need to achieve desirable knowledge by building on what they already know.

Usage-based Theory and Optimality Theory

More recent theories addressing the language acquisition question include the so-
called Usage-based theory and optimality theory. The first of these models can be traced
back to Langacker during the 1990s and 2000s and is still today conditioning the work of
many psychologist such as Michael Tomasello. As Tomasello (2000) himself describes:

In usage-based models of language […] all things flow from the actual usage events
in which people communicate linguistically with one another. The linguistic skills that a
person possesses at any given moment in time -in the form of a ‘strucutred inventory of
 symbolic units’- result from her accumulated experience with language across the totality
of usage events in her life. This accumulated linguistic experience undergoes processes
of entrenchment, due to repeated uses of particular expressions across usage events, and
abstraction, due to type variation in constituents of particular expressions across usage
events. Given this focus on usage events and the processes of language learning that occur
within these events, a crucial item on the research agenda of usage-based models of
language is, or should be, the study of how human beings build up the most basic aspects
of their linguistic competence during childhood.(p.62).

They suggest that children start constructing their knowledge about language by hearing
samples of individual words and so that they are later able to use language by means of
that knowledge. Thus, under the perspective of usage-based models, children acquire
languages on the basis of linguistic experience.

Optimality theory, on the other hand, was first introduced in 1993 by Paul
Smolensky and Alan Prince with the publication of their work Optimality Theory.
Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar but was later fully developed by J.
McCarthy among other scholars. Dekkers, Boersma and van de Weijer (2000) describe
the process of learning languages under this perspective:

In generative grammar, one task of the learner is to determine which of the

possible grammars allowed by an innate Universal Grammar is compatible with the
language she is learning. In Principles and Parameters (P&P) framework, this task
amounts to determining the correct settings of a number of usually binary innate
parameters, while in an Optimality-theoretic (OT) framework, the task amounts to
determining the correct relative rankings of a number of innate constraints.

Thus, defendants of this model, although relate themselves to the Universal

Grammar proposed by Chomsky, reject the idea of binary innate parameters that
determine the grammatically well- or ill-formed nature of a sentence. Instead, they
introduce the concept of ‘constraint’ which stands for the requirements that linguistic
devices must fit if they are to fulfill the speaker’s expectations.

As we have seen in this rather short overview across the different models, linguists
are far from providing the ultimate answers to the question of how languages are learned.
Many other models have not been mentioned here; first, for the sake of length; second,
because they are rather combinations of two or more of the ones mentioned above.
Finally, newer modern models are still under the spotlight and their assessment in
psycholinguistics as valid or discarded models is yet to be considered.

b. First Language Acquisition and Language Teaching

One of the most controversial points regarding first language acquisition studies are
those related to whether the cognitive processes involved in acquiring a first language are
the same that take place when acquiring a second or foreign language or whether, on the
contrary, these two ways of learning a language involve completely different
mechanisms. As we have seen above, the dichotomy of acquiring/learning a language has
been long discussed by linguists, and today is commonly accepted the differentiation
between these two.

Another key issue related to this question is the classical nature and nurture
differentiation. ‘Nature’ is conceived as the genetic or biological factors that individuals
inherit and make them what they ‘naturally’ are, while ‘nurture’ stands for the external
factors such as experience or social background that modulate the individuals’ nature.

When observing these issues under the linguistic perspective, we can notice how the
different approaches take part on one side or another, thus conditioning the applications
of these theories to practical contexts. For instance, one of the most well-known methods
in foreign language teaching is the so-called ‘Natural Method’, developed by L. Sauveur
in 1875 in his work An Introduction to the Teaching of Living Languages without
Grammar or Dictionary. Defenders of this method argue that there is no such a difference
in learning a first, second or foreign language, and thus teaching second or foreign
languages should mimic the way first languages are acquired during infancy. They
attempt to reproduce and contextualize language teaching in a ‘natural’ environment, thus
rejecting classical practices such as the use of the first language for instruction, the direct
study of grammatical rules or the systematic translation of texts from the source into the
target language. Instead, they focus on the development of writing, listening and reading
skills as if they were reproduced in a real context, where the teacher does not so much
‘teaching’ but serves as a ‘teaching-guider’ instead.

Although the Natural Method has its own limitations, its main importance resides on
the fact that it exposed the faults of the predominant method at the time, that is, the
‘Grammar-Translation Method’. This method traces its origins back to the middle ages,
where the study of languages was reduced to the translation of Latin and Greek ancient
texts. Since these were death languages, there was not a necessity to focus on the
development of pronunciation, reading or listening skills in students, and most times not
even in writing -students would never be able to practice these skills with a native Latin
or Ancient Greek speaker-. Thus, the process of learning these two languages consisted
basically on learning grammatical rules that would enable students to translate classical
texts. Although this method could be useful for such languages, when applied to modern
languages it can lead to dismal failure, for it pays little to no attention to oral skills, and
it is often the case that students with a great domain of the grammatical rules find
themselves unable to interact in the foreign language.

Another method that has its roots in first language acquisition theories is the one
that has always been associated with Behaviorism, that is, the Audio-Lingual Method.
Like behaviorists, defenders of this method believed that second language learning is the
product of stimuli and reinforcement as first language learning is. They refused the
predominant importance of vocabulary and oral abilities in language learning and focused
instead on the instruction on teaching grammar by means of ‘habit formation’, just as a
behavioral psychologist would do in therapy. Inside a typical audio-lingual classroom,
students imitate and repeat over and over a series of utterances delivered by the teacher,
which provides students with no direct grammatical instruction but rather either positive
or negative feedback in order to seek for accuracy.

Among the most used methods in present days is the Communicative Language
Teaching Method. Framed under the Chomskyan theory of linguistic competence that
would be later contested by Dell Hymes (1972), this method rejected the idea of language
learning as a product of habit formation and focused on linguistic creativity. The
Communicative Language teaching involves a rejection of accuracy as a goal in language
teaching in favour of fluency, that is, the acquisition of the four basic skills -learning,
writing, reading and speaking- that lead to communicative competence. It implies a shift
towards meaningful, purposeful communication instead of the understanding and learning
of grammatical structures.

As we can easily notice, the different methods employed in language teaching among
the different periods in history are based on the different linguistic approaches and the
prevailing school of thought at each moment, being these advances one of the major
contributions of applied linguistics to the world.

3. CONCLUSIONS

Throughout the present work we have seen a brief overview of the different
psychological, philosophical and linguistic approaches that have centered their efforts in
attempting to provide an explanation to language acquisition. Although the impact that
these different theories had among the linguistic community varies greatly depending on
the period, there is no doubt that these gain in importance when we consider its potential
applications in other fields such as education or speech therapy. As a language teacher, I
consider the understanding of how the acquisition of first language works as a fact of
major importance as it may help in the designing of new methodologies and techniques
that could work best for my students.

As we have seen, even when some of the models explained above have been
disregarded by many scholars and few of their pivotal points have been largely refuted
by researchers, the truth is that all of them contributed to the development of the field and
provided teachers with valuable clues and hints that they still put into practice today.

It is clear that the perfect model to explain first language acquisition has not seen the light
yet. Furthermore, we are far away to acknowledge the perfect teaching method that could
best work for everyone. Instead, what we currently have is a great deal of theories, each
of which offers a number of teaching possibilities that could be applied to different
contexts depending on our students’ peculiarities.

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