Theories and Models

of Language
Acquisition
Language Acquisition- An
Overview
Language acquisition is the
process by which humans acquire
the capacity to perceive, produce
and use words to understand and
communicate. It involves the
picking up of diverse capacities
including syntax, phonetics, and an
extensive vocabulary.
 Language Acquisition- An
Overview
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)
 Language Acquisition- An Overview

Grammar, which is a set of mental rules that

characterizes all of the sentences of a language,
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
with few wrong turns, which is quite remarkable
considering the pitfalls and complexity of the
system.
Language Acquisition- An Overview

By the time a child utters a first word,

according to the Linguistic Society of
America, he or she has already spent
many months playing around with the
sounds and intonations of language, but
there is still no one point at which all
children learn to talk.
Language Acquisition- An Overview
Children acquire language in stages and
different children reach various stages at
different times, although they have one
thing in common and that is typically
developing children learning the same
language will follow an almost identical
pattern in the sequence of stages they go
through.
 The stages usually consist of:
 cooing- 6 months- use phonemes from every language
 babbling- 9 months- selectively use phonemes from
their native language
 oneword utterances- 12 months- start using single
words
 telegraphic speech- 2 years- multi-word utterances
that lack in function
 normal speech- 5 years- almost normal developed
speech
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 explaining how native
languages are acquired go back to the
approaches put forward by researchers such as
Skinner, Chomsky, Piaget and others. Most of the
modern theories we have today have
incorporated aspects of these theories into their
various findings.
Historical Theories and Models of
Language Acquisition
Behaviourist Theory
Innateness Theory
Cognitive Theory
Social Interactionist Theory
Behaviourist Theory
 B.F Skinner's Verbal Behaviour (1957) applied a functional
analysis approach to analyze language behaviour in terms
of their natural occurrence in response to environmental
circumstances and the effects they have on human
interactions.
 According to the behaviourist theory, language learning is
a process of habit formation that involves a period of trial
and error where the child tries and fails to use correct
language until it succeeds. Infants also have human role
models in their environment that provide the stimuli and
rewards required for operant conditioning.
For example, if a child starts babblings,
which resembles appropriate words, then
his or her babbling will be rewarded by a
parent or loved one by positive
reinforcement such as a smile or clap. Since
the babblings were rewarded, this reward
reinforces further articulations of the same
sort into groupings of syllables and words in
a similar situation (Demirezen, 1988).
Children also utter words because they cause adults to
give them the things they want and they will only be
given what they want once the adult has trained or
shaped the child through reinforcement and rewards
speech close to that of adult speech. Before long
children will take on the imitation or modeling
component of Skinner's theory of language acquisition in
which children learn to speak by copying the utterances
heard around them and by having their responses
strengthened by the repetitions, corrections and other
reactions that adults provide.
However, before a child can begin to speak, they first start by
listening to the sounds in their environment for the first years of
their life. Gradually, the child learns to associate certain sounds
with certain situations such as the sound of endearment a
mother produces when feeding her child. These sounds then
become pleasurable for the child on their own without being
accompanied by food and eventually the child will attempt to
imitate these sounds to invite the attention of his mother or
another adult. If these sounds resemble that of adult language
the mother will respond with reward and the operant
conditioning process begins.
 Innateness Theory
Noam Chomsky's innateness theory (or nativist
theory) proposes that children have an inborn or
innate faculty for language acquisition that is
biologically determined. According to Goodluck
(1991), nativists view language as a fundamental
part of the human genome, as a trait that makes
humans human, and its acquisition is a natural
part of maturation.
It seems that the human species has evolved a brain
whose neural circuits contain linguistic information at
birth and this natural predisposition to learn language is
triggered by hearing speech. The child's brain is then
able to interpret what she or he hears according to the
underlying principles or structures it already contains
(Linden, 2007). Chomsky has determined that being
biologically prepared to acquire language regardless of
setting is due to the child's language acquisition
device (LAD), which is used as a mechanism for working
out the rules of language.
Chomsky believed that all human languages share
common principles, such as all languages have verbs
and nouns, and it was the child's task to establish how
the specific language she or he hears expresses these
underlying principles. For example, the LAD already
contains the concept of verb tense and so by listening to
word forms such as "worked" or "played,” the child will
then form a hypothesis that the past tense of verbs are
formed by adding the sound /d/,/t/ or /id/ to the base
form.
Yang (2006) also believes that children also initially
possess, then subsequently develop, an innate
understanding or hypothesis about grammar
regardless of where they are raised. According to
Chomsky, infants acquire grammar because it is a
universal property of language, an inborn
development, and has coined these fundamental
grammatical ideas that all humans have
as universal grammar (UG).
Children under the age of three usually don't speak in full
sentences and instead say things like "want cookie" but
yet you would still not hear them say things like "want my"
or "I cookie" because statements like this would break
the syntactic structure of the phrase, a component of
universal grammar. Another argument of the nativist or
innate theory is that there is a critical period for
language acquisition, which is a time frame during which
environmental exposure is needed to stimulate an innate
trait.
Linguist Eric Lenneberg in 1964 postulated that the
critical period of language acquisition ends around the
age of 12 years. He believed that if no language was
learned before then, it could never be learned in a
normal and functional sense. It was termed the critical
period hypothesis and since then there has been a few
case examples of individuals being subject to such
circumstances such as the girl known as Genie who was
raised in an abusive environment at age 13, which didn't
allow her to develop language skills.
In short, innateness theory tells that humans have
their own innate ability to acquire a language at a
certain period of time wherein when the right time
comes and the child failed to learn the language
he/she needs to learn, it would be impossible for
that child to learn the language normally the way
other children learned it.
 Cognitive Theory
Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who was famous for
his four stages of cognitive development for children,
which included the development of language. However,
children do not think like adults and so before they can
begin to develop language they must first actively
construct their own understanding of the world through
their interactions with their environment. A child has to
understand a concept before he or she can acquire the
particular language which expresses that concept.
 Cognitive Theory
For example, a child first becomes aware of a
concept such as relative size and only afterward
do they acquire the words and patterns to convey
that concept. Essentially it is impossible for a young
child to voice concepts that are unknown to them;
therefore, once a child learns about their
environment, then they can map language onto
their prior experience.
 Cognitive Theory
An infant's experience of a cat is that it meows, is
furry and eats from a bowl in the kitchen; hence
they develop the concept of cat first and then
learn to map the word "kitty" onto that concept.
Language is only one of the many human mental
or cognitive activities, and many cognitivists
believe that language emerges within the context
of other general cognitive abilities like memory,
attention and problem solving because it is a part
of their broader intellectual development.
 Cognitive Theory
However, according to Goodluck (1991), once
language does emerge, it is usually within certain
stages and children go through these stages in a
fixed order that is universal in all children. There is a
consistent order of mastery of the most common
function morphemes in a language and simple
ideas are expressed earlier than more complex
ones even if they are more grammatically
complicated.
 Cognitive Theory
Piaget's cognitive theory states that children's
language reflects the development of their logical
thinking and reasoning skills in stages, with each
period having a specific name and age reference.
There are four stages of Piaget's cognitive
development theory, each involving a different
aspect of language acquisition:
 Cognitive Theory
 Sensory-Motor Period- (birth to 2 years) Children are born with
"action schemas" to "assimilate" information about the world
such as sucking or grasping. During the sensory-motor period,
children's language is "egocentric" and they talk either for
themselves or for the pleasure of associating anyone who
happens to be there with the activity of the moment
 Pre-Operational Period- (2 years to 7) Children's language
makes rapid progress and the development of their "mental
schema" lets them quickly "accommodate" new words and
situations. Children's language becomes "symbolic" allowing
them to talk beyond the "here and now" and to talk about
things such as the past, future and feelings.
 Cognitive Theory
 Egocentrism- Involves "animism" which refers to young children's
tendency to consider everything, including inanimate objects,
as being alive. Language is considered egocentric because
they see things purely from their own perspective.
 Operational Period- (7 to 11 years) and (11 years to adulthood)
Piaget divides this period into two parts: the period of concrete
operations and the period of formal operations. Language at
this stage reveals the movement of their thinking from immature
to mature and from illogical to logical. They are also able to "de-
center" or view things from a perspective other than their own. It
is at this point that children's language becomes "socialized"
and includes things such as questions, answers, commands and
criticisms.
 Social Interactionist Theory
Vygotsky's social interaction theory incorporates nurture
arguments in that children can be influenced by their
environment as well as the language input children
receive from their care-givers . Although the theories of
Skinner, Chomsky and Piaget are all very different and
very important in their own contexts, they don't
necessarily take into account the fact that children don't
encounter language in isolation. The child is a little linguist
analyzing language from randomly encountered adult
utterances.
 Social Interactionist Theory
The interaction theory proposes that language
exists for the purpose of communication and can
only be learned in the context of interaction with
adults and older children. It stresses the importance
of the environment and culture in which the
language is being learned during early childhood
development because this social interaction is
what first provides the child with the means of
making sense of their own behaviour and how they
think about the surrounding world.
 Social Interactionist Theory
According to Williamson (2008), children can eventually
use their own internal speech to direct their own
behaviour in much the same way that their parents'
speech once directed their behavior. Speech to infants is
marked by a slower rate, exaggerated intonation, high
frequency, repetition, simple syntax and concrete
vocabulary. This tailored articulation used by care-givers
to young children to maximize phonemic contrasts and
pronunciation of correct forms is known as child-directed
speech (CDS).
 Social Interactionist Theory
Vygotsky also developed the concepts of private
speech which is when children must speak to themselves
in a self guiding and directing way- initially out loud and
later internally and the zone of proximal
development which refers to the tasks a child is unable to
complete alone but is able to complete with the
assistance of an adult. The attention and time that a
mother spends talking about topics that the child is
already focused on highly correlates with early
vocabulary size.
 Social Interactionist Theory
In the early stages of a child`s life this is usually done
through motherese or ``baby talk`` which may allow
children to ``bootstrap`` their progress in language
acquisition (Williamson, 2008). The mother and father also
provide ritualized scenarios, such as having a bath or
getting dressed, in which the phases of interaction are
rapidly recognized and predicted by the infant. The
utterances of the mother and father during the activities
are ritualized and predictable so that the child is gradually
moved to an active position where they take over the
movements of the care-taker and eventually the ritualized
 Social Interactionist Theory
Basically the care-giver is providing comprehensible
contexts in which the child can acquire language
(Mason, 2002). Another influential researcher of the
interaction theory is Jerome Bruner who elaborated and
revised the details of the theory over a number of years
and also introduced the term Language Acquisition
Support System (LASS), which refers to the child`s
immediate adult entourage but in the fuller sense points
to the child`s culture as a whole in which they are born.
 Social Interactionist Theory
Adults adapt their behaviour towards children to
construct a protected world in which the child is gradually
inclined to take part in a growing number of scenarios
and scripts and in this way the child is led gradually further
and further into language. However, one must remember
that although our social context provides support for
language acquisition, it does not directly provide the
knowledge that is necessary to acquire language; and
this, perhaps, is where a child’s innate abilities come into
play.
Modern Theories and Models of
Language Acquisition
 Usage-Based Theory
 Optimality Theory
 Native Language Magnet Model