School: Vocational Training Development Institute

Programme: B.Ed. in Applied technology

Course: Developmental Psychology for Educators

Name /I.D. Number: Wavel Walker: 1500195912

Christopher Brown: 2010015864

Chemlee Clarke: 1300073604

Date: April 4, 2019

Lecturer: Mrs. Linda Williamson

Theory of Cognitive Development (Nativist and Linguistics)

1
 Table of Content

Contents Page Number

Linguistics and Nativist………………………………………………….3 & 4

Language acquisition…………………………………………………………5

These Are the Stages of Development……………………………………….6

Design Features for the Use of Language……………………………….7 &8

Conclusion………………………………………………….…………………9

References……………………………………………….……………………10

2
 Linguistics and Nativist

According to the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus, A Nativist is a person

who supports the idea of nativism, which is the idea that people who were born in a country are

more important than people who have come to the country from somewhere else, A Nativist is

also one relating to or supporting the theory that concepts, mental capacities and mental

structures are innate rather than acquired by learning. While linguistics is the study of a set of

complex knowledge systems and abilities enabling speakers of the language to communicate

with others, to express ideas, hypothesis, emotions, desires and all other things that need

expressing.

Albery (2008) explained that What distinguishes us from other animals such as dogs, cats,

chimpanzees etc. is our ability to use language to communicate, while other abilities such as

memory, attention, perception and thinking are generally found in other animals’ language that is

used by human to communicate and its sophistication surpasses others species, it could be argued

that it is one of the defining characteristics of being a human. Linguist Noam Chomsky (1957,

1965) argued that humans are innately endowed with language (we were born with the ability to

learn language and develop it by using grammar) for example the speed with which a child learns

language without being taught it in any explicit way is evidence that it is innate.

3
 Linguistics and Nativist (Contd’)

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best known and the most influential linguist of the second half of

the Twentieth Century. He has made a number of strong claims about language, that is to say that

we are born with a set of rules about language in our heads which he refers to as the 'Universal

Grammar'. The universal grammar that is wired into their brain is the basis upon which all

human languages build. If a Martian linguist were to visit Earth, he would deduce from the

evidence that there was only one language, with a number of local variants. Chomsky gives a

number of reasons why this should be so.

Among the most important of these reasons is the ease with which children acquire their

mother tongue. He claims that it would be little short of a miracle if children learnt their

language in the same way that they learn mathematics or how to ride a bicycle. This, he says, is

because children are exposed to very little correctly formed language. When people speak, they

constantly interrupt themselves, change their minds, and make lips of the tongue and so on. Yet

children manage to learn their language all the same.

Children do not simply copy the language that they hear around them. They deduce rules from it,

which they can then use to produce sentences that they have never heard before. They do not

learn a repertoire of phrases and sayings, as the behaviourists believe, but a grammar that

generates infinity of new sentences.

4
 Language acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce

and use words to understand and communicate. This involves the selecting of diverse capacities

including grammar, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. However, learning a first language

is something that every normal child does successfully without much need for formal lessons.

Language development is a complex and unique human quality but yet children seem to acquire

language at a very rapid rate with most children's speech being relatively grammatical by age

three (Crain & Lillo-Martin, 1999). Grammar is a set of mental rules that characterizes all of the

sentences of a language and must be mastered in order to learn a language.

Most children in a linguistic community seem to succeed in converging on a grammatical system

equivalent to everyone else in the community, which is quite remarkable considering the pitfalls

and complexity of the system. By the time a child utters his/her first word, he / she has already

spent many months playing around with the sounds and tones of language, but there is still no

one point at which all children learn to talk. Children acquire languages in stages and different

children reach various stages at different times based on their development, although they have

one thing in common and that is that typically developing children learning the same language

will follow an almost identical pattern in the sequence of stages they go through.

5
 These Are the Stages of Development

The First stage of linguistic development is cooing which begins at the age of six (6) months

where the child uses phonemes from every language which is to utter or imitate the soft,

murmuring sound characteristic of doves, murmur or talk affectionately or passionately.

The other stage of development is known as babbling which occurs at the age of nine (9) months

where the child selectively use phonemes from their native language or one that they are been

exposed to.

The third is ‘one word utterances’ which begins at the age of twelve (12) months where the child

starts to form and use single words.

The fourth is known as telegraphic speech which occurs at the age of two (2) years old where

multi-words utterances that lack in function is been used by the child.

At five (5) years old the child develops what is known as ‘normal speech’ where normal speech

is developed.

Language acquisition is a complex and unique human quality for which there is still no theory

that is able to completely explain how language is attained. However, most of the concepts and

theories we do have today explains how native languages are acquired and approaches put

forward by well-known researchers such as Skinner, Chomsky, Piaget and a few others.

6
 Design Features for the Use of Language

The first design feature is semanticity, which stands for objects in the world, over time they

acquire association with other objects and action as well as emotional associations and are able

to be put to meaning.

The second feature is arbitrariness; meaning we ascribe words to objects arbitrarily for example,

there is no reason why we call a dog a dog, There are a few exceptions with onomatopoeic words

that sounds like the things they refer to.

The third feature is duality of patterning; this refers to the fact that combinations of arbitrary

sounds are combined to form unit’s words that has a meaning.

The fourth feature is structure dependence, this refers to the fact that language combines words

in rule-governed ways to convey information, one example is that the same word order can mean

different things (Chemlee hits Christophher as opposed to Christopher hits Chemlee) while a

different word order can mean the same thing (Andrew hits Ruel which is the same as Ruel was

hit by Andrew).

Finally the fight feature is creativity; although the sentences in language have to conform to rules

of structure, the number of combination is infinite, which means there is no restriction on what

we can say and still be understood, whatever the massage is, we can find a combination of words

to communicate.

7
 Design Features for the Use of Language (cont’d)

There are other design features that deals with the way language is used, these are: displacement

which is the use of language to refer to events in a different place at a different time, spontaneous

usage is not used only to respond to another communication or action, it is also used to freely

express thoughts and feelings that comes from an individual. And finally there’s cultural

transmission, this refers to the fact that language is passed between individuals and particularly

between parents and offspring. The psychology of language is complex yet a natural and innate

trait, we developed our language through processes such as grammar and sentence structure for

better communication with each other.

8
 Conclusion

Linguistics is a vibrant, unsettled field in which passions run high. In the end, as with so much

pertaining to the intellectual pursuits of humankind along with the different stages of linguistic

development and the designed features for the use of language, it is evident that a goodly portion

of the contradictions and energy that suffuse linguistics can be attributed to permanent

contradiction,

9
 References

Albery, P etal (2008). Complete psychology (2nded) p.205-207.

Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus, (nd) Retrieved from

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/nativist

Linguistics (2007) Retrieved from https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/about/what-is-linguistics.html

Crain, S (1999). An introduction to linguistic theory and language acquisition. Retrieved from

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Theories_and_Models_of_Language_A

cquisition

10