Language Acquisition Theories: A brief overview

Hafiz Ahmad Bilal

Department of English, University of Sargodha

PhD Semester 1

Applied Linguistics

Dr Ijaz Asghar

Assistant Professor
 Language Acquisition Theories: A brief overview

It all starts in history, with some ancient thinkers who were curious about how the universe

worked, in this case, how humans were able to learn language. Those philosophers came to the

conclusion with "armchair psychology" (sitting and thinking about the problem), that humans

could learn languages because of their ability to learn knowledge and conceptual skills. They

assumed that language was an innate ability with which humans were born. For instance, Plato

thought the word mapping in one way or another was also innate.

For over 12 centuries, scholars who studied Sanskrit, a former language used more than

3,000 years ago in today's India, had debated whether it was a thing passed down by the generation

and learned from pre-established conventions to recognize and use the correct meaning of words

in Sanskrit. (For example, a kid learns a word ‘horse’ because he hears older speakers talk about

horses, or if it was innate ability a child learns that word for horse).Later philosophers such as John

Locke and Thomas Hobbes joined the language party, arguing that knowledge (and, in Locke's

case, language) is derived from abstracted sense of experiences.

The 1950s marked the beginning of the new era of child language acquisition. There's a

popular dispute between Skinner, who argued and propounded what was later called behaviourist

account of learning language, and Chomsky, who was of the view that language learning is not

possible only through listening. There must be a system in learner’s head that allows the language

to be processed in a particular manner to enable the learner to construct a grammar with a very

meagre input of language you are exposed to. The debate between Chomsky and his supporters,

who believe that innate knowledge of the language is a must to learn a language, and different
adversaries who consider that learner can actually learn only what he hears, has never ended and

is a hot debate that has attracted the attention of linguists even today.

The simplest way to study the language-learning process is to simply watch and listen when

kids talk. Researcher parents for instance Stern and Stern, 1907; Leopold, 1939–1949, reported on

their own child's statements in the early studies. The goal of the diarist was to list all the new words

produced by the child. Diary studies were then replaced, generally for a period of years, with audio

and video samples of talk by a number of children. The longitudinal study of Adam, Eve and Sarah

by Brown (1973) are by far the most celebrated of these contemporary works.

Behaviourist Accounts

This view posited that language learning was like a habit formation (Skinner, 1957). It was

based on the concept of stimulus and response. Up to the second half of 1950s, language was

thought to be yet another trait that could be learned using general behavioural rules like associative

learning, reinforcement, and imitation, which were in line with the psychological theories of the

time. Consider associative learning, which is a common mechanism of language learning where a

different response is linked to a specific stimulus. The use of association appears to be a usual way

to describe the children’s vocabulary learning processes – tags are taught to children by relating a

spoken word with a recognizable entity. Quine’s (1960) popular theoretical puzzle emphasizes the

issue: Imagine you're a foreigner with no local language knowledge in a foreign country. One

native says 'gavagai' when he points to a distant rabbit. You try to combine a specific response

with the new "gavagai" stimulus, but you should choose which stimulus? The rabbit entirely? Or

just its tail? Or its ears? The event that is taking place? The opportunities are unlimited and

associative learning resolves just a few things. In addition, copying and encouragement were

suggested as instruments through which young learners could acquire the language "habits”.
Nevertheless, the most in-depth examination of the ways of learning language shows that none of

the mechanisms mechanism is enough to achieve the required level of learning a language. In this

broad sense, learners are capable of learning a language they have been exposed to. Do children,

on the other hand, model their sentences after the ones they hear? Some do, but many children do

not follow in their footsteps (Bloom et al., 1974). Furthermore, children who imitate do not acquire

language much faster than children who do not imitate. And children who imitate on a regular

basis do not mimic anything they hear, selectively they are just imitating the sections of the phrases

which they can handle at that point in time. Imitation is, therefore, driven by both the child and the

sentences heard by the child. What about other people's reactions to the sentences of these

children? Do children pick up on the types of sentences that their parents use? Parents may reward

their children for producing grammatically correct sentences while punishing them for producing

grammatically incorrect sentences. As a result, the child will be motivated to make correct

sentences while being prevented from making incorrect ones.

This account has a couple of flaws. The first according to Brown and Hanlon (1970), is

that, in most cases, parents do not give response to the utterances of their children, based on their

grammatical correctness. Parents are more likely to refer to the substance of their children's

sentences than to the structure of their sentences. Further, though children's correct and incorrect

sentences were handled in different ways, it is also up to children to figure out what distinguishes

correct sentences from incorrect sentences. For instance, if the child utters the phrase "I coloured

the wall blue," grammatically correct, and the parents reacted positively (thus ignores the troubling

content of the sentence and concentrates on its structure), the child still needs to understand the

generalisation process of the sentence. In order to recognize an analogous term, the parents have

to comprehend the designs that result in a sentence. For example they can tell that “I saw the wall
blue” is grammatically incorrect in contrast to another sentence “I pounded the clay flat” that is

correct. To say it simply, much inductive work still needs to be done even if children are given a

number of the right sentences to generalize.

The publication of Noam Chomsky's study of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour in 1959

gave a devastating blow to his behaviourist view of language. Adult language usage, according to

Chomsky, cannot be properly defined in terms of actions or responses. Each person's

understanding and use of language is based on a set of abstract rules, these are the laws that

children follow as they learn a new language. When the problem of language acquisition is seen

in this way, the solution needs to be entirely different.

Nativist Accounts

Chomskian perspectives are based on the assumption that without explicit instruction the

children learn a subtle and abstract language system, without sufficient input information to

support the induction of those specific principles, in fact. This refers to Plato’s account of the issue

of the poverty of the stimulus. Chomsky (1965) further claimed that, if the input provides little

information to explain the children’s learning a language, then there are innate knowledge of

structures and language-specific learning procedures are supporting the process of language

acquisition. This is taken as a priori knowledge in terms of the principles and parameters

determining the number of possible human languages according to the theory of Universal

Grammar (UG).

UG is supposed to be part of the human knowledge. The principles of Universal Grammar

postulates a framework for language characteristics, the data with which the child comes in contact

is often left open with several options to be decided. For instance, freedom of the choice of

arrangement of words is a variation parameter. Certain languages, such as English, have precise
word order requirements, a few others (Russian, Japanese) enumerate a limited number of

instructions that are permissible. For learners to set their language parameters, the input from a

given language is required. A significant characteristic of the theory is the fact that a character can

lead to a bunch of grammatical characteristics apparently not related to the language. The null-

subject parameter, for instance, has several functions: whether in all declarative sentences explicit

subjects are required (in English yes, in Italian no), if there are expletive elements such as "it" in

"it appears" or "there" in "there is" (in English yes, in Italian no), is it permissible to invert subjects

freely in simple sentences? (in English yes , in Italian no), and so forth. The hypothesis is that the

information needed to set the null–subject parameter causes all of these elements of a child's

grammar to align at the same time (Hyams, 1989).

At the moment, there is debate about whether such predictions are backed by child

language evidence. Furthermore, according to the Minimalist Programme, the quest for common

features and principles in a linguistic theory is strengthened via stating the fact that inherited

linguistic information is the most efficient method available (Chomsky, 1993). However, innate

understanding of the concepts fundamental to a language is insufficient to explain how a child

acquires a language. How does he know what is a subject or a nominal he learns in a particular

language? Of course a child needs to determine in their language the subjects and verbs before

deciding whether both are precisely arranged in the language, and prior to applying any innate

knowledge they possess about the structure of language. As a result, children need learning

procedures in addition to intrinsic syntactic awareness, which may be language-specific. One

example of a potential language learning way is a collection of rules to connect semantic and

syntactic categories (Pinker, 1989). As per this theory, children have the knowledge by birth that

doers are probable subjects in sentences, etc. It's as simple as classifying the agent based on
context. The connecting principles enable them to deduce from the sentence's subject that the word

used to refer to the subjects. They are then able to take over their inherent knowledge of how these

elements are structured. There is again controversy about whether children's language data support

such assumptions. For example, ergative languages do not link agents directly to subjects, however

small children can easily acquire them (Ochs, 1982).

Social / Cognitive Accounts

There are essentially two assertions in the nativist position: (1) at least certain language-

specific rules of arrangement and are distinct from other cognitive systems; (2) These rules are

procedures developed biologically, i.e., centred on children and not the environment of the child

themselves that guide the implementation of those principles. It is worth-noting that both the

claims go side by side, they don't have to. It's possible that the concepts underlying linguistic

understanding are both unique to language and applied all-round learning mechanisms in a general

way. While such mechanisms should be more complex than those offered by behavioural

mechanisms. More recently, this is called a social or cognitive account of linguistic learning (Bohn

et al., 2018). We can, for example, often guess their intention by examining the actions where they

look, how they stand, how they move hands and faces. This information could help young children

reduce their hypothesis on what a lexical item denotes. Baldwin (1993) observes when a speaker

speaks a new word, looks at an object, a child will interpret the utterer's words as referring to that

thing despite the fact that the child is not looking at that particular object. In simple words, kids

can use common signals to steer their language guesses.

The language itself can also be used by children to guess meanings. If, as Gleitman and her

colleagues discovered, the structures of sentences kids listen to signals their meanings to a certain

degree (Fisher et al., 1991). In a process known as "syntactic bootstrapping," kids might use the
structure to make meanings. Naigles et al. (1993) find that there is some testimony that even young

kids can be syntactically bootstrap into language. When children first begin to talk, they do not

sound like adults, there is obviously some work to be done in terms of growth. What kind of work

is needed, specifically? Some nativists believe that children already possess all of the grammatical

categories and syntactic concepts. But their operating system is no efficient. In that respect, there

is no change of grammatical system in the development work to be done. Another point of view

proposes that during growth, the language radically shifts from one system that is constructed on

semantic categories to a system grounded on syntax.

This transformation could be driven by inherent linking rules or dictated by growth and

development. The transition, on the other hand, may be the product of children making an inductive

leap based on the linguistic data accessible to them, in combination mostly with cognitive and

interpersonal skills. Both social and cognitive accounts of language acquisition depend on this

inductive leap. While cognitive underpinnings are unquestionably important, they may not be

adequate for the development of linguistic abilities. Iverson and Goldin-Meadow (2005) conclude

that the onset of sign language combinations þ that express two elements of a proposition called

"open þ point at box, for example, occurs many months well before onset of two-word

combinations called "open box, implying that the capability to articulate two semantic components

cognitively isn't the ultimate sticking point for two-word combinations. More than probably, the

problem with linguistic patterns is the difficulty of extracting from the input.

According to social and cognitive accounts, linguistic feedback provides enough

information that learners hear to trigger a grammatical structure, predominantly in the sense of the

positive communal surroundings in which they reside. According to extensive studies, adults

change the way they speak to their children. Children's speech, often referred to as mother's or
child-directed speech, is lenient, shorter, higher in length, exaggerated in intonation, more

grammatical and content-oriented than adult talk (Snow, 1972). Newport et al. (1977) found that

a child pays special consideration and attention to this input and interpret it in accordance with his

own preferences or operating principles, for instance, learners are more careful about the ends of

words. Even so, one issue with suggesting motherese as a language-learning device for children is

that child-directed speech may not always be applicable to all contexts. In several contexts, learners

contribute as over-hearers rather than as receivers in communicative interactions and the language

the children are exposed to will not be studied and understood in an identical manner.

However, as Ochs and Schieffelin (1995) suggest, in such linguistic and ethnic contexts,

children be proficient operators of their grammar systems in approximately the same periods.

Given the robustness of expression, these findings indicate that there could be several evolutionary

routes to all the same result. The conundrum that leaners do not generally obtain streamlined input

is very interesting that kids can simplify themselves. For example, due to their limited memory,

young children may be unable to remember whole sequences of words or all of the sounds that

make up individual words. As a consequence, according to the theory of "less is more" they

perform the necessary analytic work to derive linguistic recurring patterns from a smaller, refined

set of data (Elman, 1993). This filtering can be exactly what children need to reach their language

systems. Furthermore, it is a universal practice that kids worldwide presumably contribute to the

linguistic situation to the same extent.

Time-line of Language Learning Theories
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