** PERSEPSCTIVES OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT **

INTERACTIONISM

 Language development is an interaction of the innate features of the mind and the children’s
language learning experiences
 There is a device that allows children to develop language based on experience, but no built-
in language knowledge (VS LAD of nativism)

Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Approach (Constructivism)

 Language knowledge is the result of continuing interaction between the cognitive functioning
(past experiences) and the environment (new information)
 Children use inborn mental equipment but operate on information provided by the
environment
 Cognitive development determines language development
 Four cognitive development stages:

1. Sensorimotor Stage (birth-age 2)

 Infants’ knowledge of the world is constructed based on sensory perception and motor
activities
 Beginning stage: out of sight. Out of mind
 Last stage: develop object permanence- the understanding of the existence of objects even
when they are out of sight
 Children have to achieve object permanence before they can use symbols or produce
language to represent objects  first words

2. Pre-operational Stage (age 2-7)

 Children start to use language in their thinking
 Not capable of mental operations
 Capable of symbolic thinking (symbols and images) and symbolic play (role-play)
 Always ask “why” questions as they are experimenting the world
 Egocentric; can't take the perspectives of other people

3. Concrete Operational Stage (age 7-11)

 Capable of mental operation and logical thinking but limited to concrete events
 No abstract, hypothetical thinking

4. Formal Operational Stage (age 11 and above)

 Capable of abstract and hypothetical thinking
 Capable of thinking possible consequences
 Able to reflect their own thinking processes
 Not all people can reach this stage

Evidence supporting and against constructivism

  co-occurrence of vocabulary spurt (rapid development) and the appearance of two-word
combinations at the end of the sensorimotor stage
  children are not able use past tense until they have grasped the concept of time
  co-occurrence is not equivalent to causality
 deaf children learn to sign before they fully reach object permanence
 ability to produce language is related to vocal cord maturation

Nativist VS Constructivist
 Piaget saw the human child and his mind as an active, constructive agent that slowly inches
forward in a perceptual bootstrap operation
 Chomsky viewed the mind as a set of essentially preprogrammed units, each equipped from
the first to realize its full complements of rules and needing only the most modest
environmental trigger to exhibit its intellectual wares

Information Processing Approach

 A mechanism that encodes, interprets, operates and stores information from the environment
and retrieves information from the memory
 Treats language as no different from any other information  a set of repeated patterns
 We store and process information like a computer
 Connectionist Model and Emergentism:
 we store information by separating it into pieces of features, by combining the features,
we reproduce the information
 language learning relies on the competition of various linguistic cues. The most reliable
one presented by adults will be acquired quickly

NATURE OR NURTURE

 Nature: genetic, biologically determined  Nativists

 Nurture: environmental factors, such as religions and language environment  Behaviorists
 Nativists and interactionists generally believe that there must be an faculty for language
acquisition but they disagree about the nature.
 Domain specific theory (under Modularity Thesis):
 knowledge of language is innate
 human mind has a language-specific module besides other modules such as number,
perception and spatial location
  information from other module cannot be used to help the language module
 ensure rapid and efficient learning
 dismiss the concept of general mental ability
 Domain general theory:
 the cognitive skills that contribute to language acquisition also contribute to the
development of many other learning and behaviors