CLA: theorists

Question 1

Behaviourists believe…

Answer 1

language is developed through imitating others’ language and gaining positive and negative feedback from adults.

Question 2

Social Interactionist believe…

Answer 2

children’s early language can be influenced and improved by adult carers adjusting their own speech patterns.

Question 3

Nativists believe…

Answer 3

language is innate; we are ‘pre-programmed’ to acquire it.

Question 4

Cognitive theorist believe…

Answer 4

language will grow when children’s ideas about the world develop.

Question 5

Behaviourism theorist

Answer 5

BF skinner: 1959, wrote ‘Verbal Behaviour’ which states that language is just another form of learned behaviour – positive and negative reinforcement
Believed that children are born as ‘blank states’

Question 6

Behaviourist experiment

Answer 6

The Bandura Experiment: :
Children exposed to the violent model tended to imitate the exact behaviour they had observed when the adult was no longer present.

Boys who observed adult males behaving violently were more influenced than those who had observed female models behaving aggressively. Interestingly, the experimenters found in same-sex aggressive groups, boys were more likely to imitate physical acts of violence while girls were more likely to imitate verbal aggression.

Question 7

Issues with Behaviourism

Answer 7

• Parents are more interested in the truth or meaning of a child’s utterance than it being non-standard, e.g. “no cross, car do come” – not likely to be corrected
• Research shown that correcting a non-standard utterance might actually impede language development
• Over-generalisation
• Imitation does have role but something else needed to explain acquisition of such complex system

Question 8

Nativism explanation

Answer 8

• All children have an inbuilt language acquisition device (LAD) that enables them to extract the rules of the particular language from the words and structures they hear.
• Universal grammar: a theory that all languages share a similar grammatical structure under the surface.
• Critical period: children’s LADs must be activated with sufficient input before the age of 12, or the child’s language acquisition will be impaired.

Question 9

Nativist Theorist

Answer 9

Noam Chomsky:

• Chomsky argued that language development can’t be all about imitation because:
• Children exposed to very little ‘correctly’ formed language – interruptions, slips of tongue, mistakes
• Children don’t just copy the language they hear around them. They don’t have to wait until they’ve heard an exact sentence before they can repeat it – they formulate rules. Accounts for “linguistic creativity”
• Language has a quality of innateness.
• Big gap between evidence available to child and linguistic system they ultimately construct
• Language Acquisition Device (LAD: an instinctive mental ability to develop language)
• Universal Grammar: The belief that all languages share common grammatical elements e.g. categories of nouns and verbs
• Children assemble sets of rules as they see language about them

Question 10

Issues with Nativism (Chomsky)

Answer 10

• Just focuses on grammar
• Ignores environment
• Ignores relationship between cognition and language
• More recent researchers have started to suggest that instead of having a language-specific mechanism for language processing, children might be capable of detecting patterns when they have heard a sufficient number of examples of a particular grammatical use

Question 11

Social interaction Theorist

Answer 11

Jerome Bruner:

• Interactions between child and carer are crucial to lang development and help children develop important abilities such as turn-taking.
• Importance of conversations, routines of social interaction,
• Must be LASS (support system) as well as LAD. Parents provide ritualised scenarios – bath, meal, getting dressed – phrases of interaction rapidly recognised and predicted
• But: not the case in all cultures

Question 12

Vygotsky…

Answer 12

The Zone of Proximal Development:
- A Russian psychologist had similar views to Piaget. He also believed that collaborative play has an influence and essential part in a child’s early development. In instances where the emphasis is put more on play than teaching a child is required to stretch their cognitive abilities in and understanding new concepts or ideas without even realising they are being taught. Vygotsky said “What a child can do in co-operation today, he can do alone tomorrow”.

Question 13

Cognitive theorist

Answer 13

Jean Piaget:
- Suggested that LA is part of child’s wider development – language comes with understanding.

A child cannot linguistically articulate concepts he does not understand
Eg, can only use superlative and comparative adjectives such as bigger, longest, when they have grasped concept of relative sizes
Can’t employ adverbs of time (yesterday, tomorrow) until they have grasped concept of time passing
Problems: some children with cognitive problems still manage to use lang beyond apparent understanding

Question 14

The ‘fis’ phenomenon

Answer 14

The “fis” phenomenon
Berko and Brown (1960s).
Discovered that a child who referred to a plastic inflatable fish as a “fis”, couldn’t link to an adult’s use of “fis” with the same object.

Question 15

Patricia Kuhl

Answer 15

Studied exaggerated vowel sounds used by parents when speaking to 6-month olds (in English, Swedish and Russian). Babies turn towards adults who speak in sing-song voice, ignoring regular conversation. Mothers in all three countries exaggerated the important vowels.