Theories of Language Development

A Written Report
Presented to
Prof. Alyanah G. Pantao
Faculty Member, English Department
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Mindanao State University
Marawi City

In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Course
ELT 200 (The Development of Language Acquisition and Learning)
1st Semester, AY: 2021-2022

Presented by

YUSLIMAH M. ANDRADA

October 2021
Theories of Language Development:

1. GENERATIVIST

 Proponent: Noam Chomsky

 Born on Dec. 7, 1928.
 American Linguist, Philosopher, Cognitive Scientist, Logician, Activist
 Has a significant impact on the intellectual community since the mid 20th Century.
 Chomsky pointed out poverty of stimulus for the acquisition of language. He was
against stimulus play vital role in language learning.
 Some brain activities are unconscious and reflexive, just as the case for many physical
processes.

Generativist view of language

• language is a species-specific property

– part of the mind/brain.

• Children are born with a faculty of language in its Initial State

– i,e. the state of the faculty of language before it is exposed to the input of a particular
language.
– innate knowledge: Universal Grammar.

• Language is a human faculty

– It is part of the human biological endowment
- thanks to the faculty of language, any speaker of a language is believed to internalize a
system of rules in a particular way.

Definition of Generativism

 It implies the usefulness and feasibility of describing the human language by means of
generative grammars (Lyons, 1981).

Generative Grammar

 Generative grammar is a theory of grammar, that is based on the idea that all humans
have an innate language capacity.

 Grammar refers to the set of rules that structure a language, including syntax (the
arrangement of words to form phrases and sentences) and morphology (the study of
words and how they are formed). Generative grammar is a theory of grammar that
holds that human language is shaped by a set of basic principles that are part of the
 human brain (and even present in the brains of small children). This "universal
grammar," according to linguists like Chomsky, comes from our innate language
faculty.

Generativism and language acquisition

 Under a generative approach, human beings are assumed to be prewired for language,
beginning life not with a blank slate but rather with a linguistic template or blueprint that
they flesh out upon exposure to specific linguistic data.
 Instead of learning language by imitating those around them, children can create their
own grammars.
 Most children are not given explicit instruction in their language.
 although the environments in which children acquire their language vary, they all go
through similar stages in acquiring a language and during the same general time
although children do not hear examples of every possible structural pattern, they
nonetheless attain a grammar capable of generating all the possible sentences in their
language (poverty of the stimulus).

2. INTERACTIONIST

 Proponent: Bruner, Vygotsky

 Focus on interaction.
 “Interactionist theories are concerned with the interplay between environmental &
biological factors in the process of acquiring language.”
 Assumes that language acquisition is influenced by the interaction of a number of factors:
physical, linguistic, cognitive, social, and biologically based attachment behaviour. It
serves the social and affective needs of both infants and their parents.

Proponent: Bruner

 Bruner (1983) argues parents provide their children a Language Acquisition Support
System or LASS and coined the term in response to Chomsky's LAD.
 The LASS is a collection of strategies that parents employ to facilitate their children’s
acquisition of language who claimed that the interactions that take place between a
developing child and linguistically knowledgeable adults are crucial in shaping language
acquisition. (Emmit et al. 2015)
 Suggest that the language behaviour of adults when talking to children referred to as
child-directed speech is specially adapted to support the acquisition process. This
support is often described to as scaffolding for the child's language learning. This process
ensures that children receive enough support in the initial stages of learning language.
(Jerome Bruner: Scaffolding and Constructivism Theories (n.d))
  He is famous for his belief in the importance of parental input and scaffolding to create
shared meaning.

Proponent: Vygotsky

 Vygotsky created a model of human development that called the sociocultural model.
He believed that all cultural development in children is visible in two stages:

a. The More Knowledgeable Other (MKO): The MKO refers to anyone who has a
better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, with respect to a
particular task, process, or concept. (e.g., teacher, coach, adult, etc.)

 He focused on the co-construction of knowledge between children and adults

(McLeod, 2014).
 The child observes the interaction and the importance of conversation between
other people and then the behavior develops inside the child and saw in these
conversations the origins of both language and thought (Vygotsky, 1978).

b. The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) a level that a child is able to do when
there is support from interaction with a more advanced interlocutor.

 "It is a guided learning within the ZPD." (McLeod, 2014)

 In brief, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is where learners construct the
new language through socially mediated interaction via the process of
“scaffolding” (Vygotsky, 1978).

3. USAGE-BASED:

 Introduced by Michael Tomasello (2003). According to him, the children learn language
from their language experiences and a language structure emerges from language use.
 Children initially build up their language through very concrete constructions based
around individual words or frames on the basis of the speech they hear and use.
 This theory emphasizes the effects of frequency of use on cognitive representations, as
patterns that are repeated for communicative reasons seem to become automated and
conventionalized.
 language meaning is language use and out of meaning emerges language.
 According to usage-based language learning theory, children don’t learn words directly.
Instead, they try to comprehend things said to them (utterances). In understanding the
utterance, children have to work out the functions of its individual words, or at least some
of them. Learning their function within an utterance probably comes through repeated
exposure to the word.
4. CONNECTIONIST

 Compares the brain to a computer system. 

 This theory assumes that children learn language by creating neural connections in the
brain and embodied in a network of simple processing units joined by connections which
are strengthened or weakened in response to regularities in input patterns. A child
develop such connections through exposure to language and by using language.
 a theory for learning in which knowledge is understood as an association between ideas;
making connections of neurons in the brain. Then, learning is just the outcome of
modifying the strength of those connections. They form complex networks processing
information; if two units are activated at the same time when a task is performed, then the
strength of the connection increases (Williams, 2005, p. 2).

Parallel Distributed Processing

• Best-known connectionist approach within SLA.

• Processing takes place in a network of nodes (or “units”) in the brain that are connected.
• Connection between nodes are called “Connection strengths” or “Patterns of activation”.
• The strength of the associations changes with the frequency of input and the nature of
feedback.
 Children “process” modes of discourse by tallying the input frequencies of the
phonological characteristics of language and the corresponding phonological patterns  

Figure 1: A neural network that

reads letters and recognizes words.
When a letter is detected, the
corresponding letter node activates
all words that contain it (lines with
arrows). Since only one word can be
present at a time, word nodes
compete with inhibitory connections
(lines with filled circles).

5. BEHAVIOURIST

 Proponent: B. F. Skinner
 Principle: Say what I say.
 The behaviorists, tried to explain learning without referring to mental process. This
theory sees the language learner as “Tabula Rasa” (blank slate).
  This theory claim that child language acquisition is governed by habit forming and
reinforcement by imitation, repetition, and analogy.
 Behaviorism gave birth to a Stimulus-Response theory.
 Behavioral theory remained dominant in the first half of 20th century. It is an approach to
psychology. and learning. It stresses on observable and measurable behaviors. In
behaviorism, the learners are viewed as passively adopting to their environment
 The quality and quantity of the language that the child hears, as well as the consistency
of the reinforcement offered by others in the environment would shape the child’s
language behavior.

Four steps for a child to acquire his/her L1:

IMITATION→REINFORCEMENT→REPETITION→HABITUATION

positive negative good habit bad habit

 positive reinforcement: praise or reward

 negative reinforcement: corrections
 good habit: correct performance
 bad habit: errors

Ex:
A young child will try to imitate sounds he hears from his parents as best he can. When a
child says a word that sounds close to what the parents say, they accept and reinforce it. In other
words, they begin shaping the word until the child can eventually say the word as well as the
parents do. 

References

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