Introduction to Psycholinguistics

Name : Kadek Yunita Adriyanti

NIM : 1712021181

Class : 6F

Summary of the Theories of Children Language Acquisition

There are several theories of language acquisition by some experts, namely:

1. Nurture and Nature

1) Nurture Theory by Skinner
Nurture theory says that a child acquire and learn language through
imitation. Language learning occurs as the result of giving feedback on success.
Therefore, it is important to encourage the child by giving positive reinforcement
when she or he can produce correct speech.
Imitation is the main point of this language acquisition/learning theory;
therefore a child may not follow the stages of language development because he
or she only acquires language by imitating. Because of the imitating, a child has
limited number of sentences and there is the possibility that he or she replicate the
grammatical errors from the parents.
2) Nature Theory by Chomsky
Children are born with a specific innate ability to discover for themselves
the underlying rules of a language system on the basis of the samples of a natural
language they are exposed to. It can be helped by LAD (Language Acquisition
Device), once the LAD is activated, children are able to discover the structure of
the language.
The strengths of this theory are:
a. Under/Overextension, which means the children are able to
discover the structure of the language and the grammatical rules by
LAD.
b. Impressive speed of language acquisition, it’s really easy to pick
up the language by using LAD.
 c. The children don’t need to replicate the parents’ grammatical
errors because they are not imitating.

The weakness of this theory is that interaction has an important key role.

2. Social Interaction Theory

There are two experts that concern with this theory, namely:
1) Bruner
Bruner came up with the idea of there is a companion to the LAD, it's
called LASS (Language Acquisition Support System). This theory beliefs that
when children acquire language, they rely on some external supports such as more
knowledgeable others including reinforcement and child directed speech, as well
as environment and social routine.
2) Vygotsky
There are three main points that Vygosky stated about this theory, they are:
a. In the language and learning acquisition, there is zone of proximal
development, which means what learners can do with guidance or
scaffolding.
b. It is difficult to measure the relationship between parental input and
language acquisition. It’s hard to know the causes of the changing process
of language development stages.
c. Interaction does play important part in language acquisition.

3. Cognitive Theory by Piaget

Piaget says that children are active learners and they can't be taught before they're
ready to learn, whatever you're going to be teaching them, it use the environment and the
social interactions to take shape their language. There are for main stages namely:
a. Sensorimotor.
It happens to a child from birth to two years old. In this stage, the child
will use senses, they classify objects and only use concrete lexis, and the
idea of object permanence will start to develop.
b. Pre-operational
It happens to a child at the age of two to nearly seven. In this stage,
language is very egocentric sets; the child will not learn enough words to
be able to make it seem egocentric. Also, the language and motor skills
develop even further.
c. Concrete Operational
It happens to a child at the age of seven to eleven. It is happen when
logical thinking about concrete events starts to take place.
d. Formal Operational
It happens to a child at the age of eleven to up. This is when it comes more
abstract and less concrete
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