Lesson 3:

LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION:
THEORETICAL
BACKGROUND
 LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT
There are a lot of controversies regarding the relation
between language and thought:
Is language simply grafted on top of cognition as a way
of sticking communicable labels onto thoughts (Fodor,
1975; Piaget, 1926)? Or does learning a language
somehow means learning to think in that language?
The relation between language and thought can
be looked at from three different perspectives:

 Language predominates thought

 Thought has primacy
 Language and thought are mutually
dependent.
Benjamin Whorf (1956) is the chief proponent of
the first claim, who hypothesized that language,
decides thought.
On the other hand, Piaget (1926) and his
followers subscribe to the second claim. The
theorists who hold the third claim is
represented by Vygotsky.
 THE PRIMACY OF
THOUGHT
 Language acquisition would be learning to
think not just learning to talk.
 This means that thought cannot exist without
language.
 According to this conception, people talking
different languages perceive the world
differently
THOUGHT PREDOMINATES
LANGUAGE
This is what eventually leads to
the development of language.
Language is the product of
thought
THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE
INFLUENCE EACH OTHER
Though thought predominates language,
thought and language influence each
other.
 Vygotsky

 Vygotsky (1986) has given a

comprehensive argument on thought and
language relating them to the growth of the
child through various stages of infancy.
 R. Schaffer
 In Schaffer's opinion more than the quantity of
linguistic experience that the child gets, it is the
quality of experience that matters more. While
retaining the notion of an innate language
component,
 R. Schaffer focuses on the relationship between
mother and child.
 Bruner
 Bruner (1986) tried to identify the real mechanisms
involved in non-verbal communication process.
One of the ways the child takes recourse to inviting
the attention of parents is by "pointing".
 Noam Chomsky
 Ever since the Chomskyan model of linguistics
came into being in 1957, a number of ideas have
emerged during the past few decades based on
the notion of Universal Grammar (UG).
THANK YOU !!