Introducing Second Language Acquisition. Kirsten M. Hummel

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Figure 2.4 U‐shaped curve representing the learning of irregular grammatical items.

      Children's knowledge of language continues to develop throughout childhood and adolescence, but, remarkably, by the age of five or six, complex syntactic constructions and virtually the entire phonological repertoire of their language are well in place in most children.

2.4 theoretical views

      One basic fundamental distinction underlying various theoretical views about L1 acquisition revolves around the extent to which language is viewed as basically the result of innate processes, i.e. nativism or a nativist view, and the extent to which environmental factors are considered as primarily responsible, i.e. empiricism or an empiricist view. This debate is far from recent: the ancient Greek philosophers were interested in the same distinction. Plato proposed that humans are born with certain “innate ideas,” while Aristotle mused about the “blank slate” that marks a person's coming into the world.

       nativism

      A theoretical approach emphasizing the innate, possibly genetic, contributions to any behavior.

       empiricism

      Theoretical view that emphasizes the role of the environment and experience over that of innate ideas or capacities.

2.4.1 behaviorist view

B. F. Skinner (1904–1990), an American psychologist, was perhaps the best known proponent of an extreme empiricist, or behaviorist, view of language acquisition, known as behaviorism. He viewed the child as a passive recipient, subjected to environmental influences. In this view, language was considered as “verbal behavior,” and only what was observable and measurable was accepted as a means to evaluate language acquisition; no attempt was made to hypothesize about non‐perceptible mental events. Behaviorists such as Skinner explained vocabulary comprehension through “classical conditioning,” or the pairing of a stimulus and a response. In concrete terms, Skinner proposed that when an infant hears the word “milk” on receiving his bottle, he comes to associate the word “milk” with that nutritive substance. Along the same lines, productive vocabulary is explained by “operant conditioning”: when the child utters a word that produces the desired effect, then the child is more likely to reproduce that word and, in contrast, words that do not trigger hoped‐for responses tend to disappear. For example, if a child says “mama” in the mother's presence, the child is reinforced by receiving the desired attention. On the other hand, if the child says “mama” when the mother is not present, the link between the word and its referent is not reinforced. Eventually the child's mother becomes the stimulus evoking the response “mama,” such that a bond is established between the mother and the word “mama.” This approach also anticipates a role for direct imitation. Imitation is considered to be self‐reinforcing, and allows a shortcut so that tedious shaping of each verbal response is not necessary.

       behaviorism

      Theoretical view proposing that learning principles can explain most behavior, and observable events, rather than mental activity, are the proper objects of study.

      While the behaviorist view of language acquisition had considerable impact on the field, it was sharply criticized by researchers, in particular linguists, who, by the late 1950s, had come to very different conclusions about the language acquisition process. Most notably, Chomsky (1959, p. 42) wrote a strongly worded critique of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior in which he argued: “I have been able to find no support whatsoever for the doctrine … that slow and careful shaping of verbal behavior through differential reinforcement is an absolute necessity.” In fact, most research studies have reported that there is little evidence of direct reinforcement of children's utterances. Further, linguists point out that imitation accounts for little syntactic learning and, in any case, is infrequent beyond age two. In addition, children produce forms like “goed” and “wented,” which they do not hear in the environment. Also, importantly, the behaviorist view fails to explain creativity, the fact that children produce novel utterances, like “the paper is soaky” (for “soaking wet,” see Clark 1993) that do not resemble utterances they hear in their environment.

2.4.2 universal grammar

While behaviorists highlighted the environment as the principal agent in bringing about language, a radically different view emerged largely in reaction to that mechanistic behaviorist model. In the Universal Grammar (UG) view, the environment serves essentially only as a trigger for language development. The UG approach views language as unique and different from other cognitive systems. It suggests that humans possess what can be considered as a “language faculty,” i.e. a universal set of underlying principles, called UG, which lends its name to this theoretical approach. The existence of UG allows children to form hypotheses about language when they are exposed to a finite set of examples from their environment. In this regard, UG linguists refer to what has been called the “logical problem of language acquisition,” i.e. that without UG, language learning would be impossible because the input data are insufficiently rich to allow acquisition to occur. The inadequacy of the input is also referred to as the “poverty of the stimulus.” In other words, the language that children are exposed to is characterized by abbreviated utterances, interruptions, ungrammatical sequences, etc., such that they could not possibly receive enough information about all the grammatical, possible sentences of the language by exposure alone; something else must be helping children induce the rules of the language, and that something is the proposed “Universal Grammar” they are born with as part of their genetic endowment. This approach is therefore nativist, in emphasizing the biologically inherited aspect of UG.

       Universal Grammar (UG)

      The innate principles and properties that characterize the grammars of all human languages; also used to describe the theoretical view associated with this concept.

      This view also emphasizes that first words “… are the culmination of previous, complex language development … words … develop in parallel to acquisition of the formal system of language, and in part as a result of this” (Lust 2006, p. 263).

      The species‐specific nature of language is also emphasized in this approach: language is unique to humans; other species' communication systems are fundamentally different from human language.

      Language learning in practice: Human language vs animal communication

      There is a long history of interest in examining animal communication systems to see whether they resemble human language and whether certain animal species (such as chimpanzees) can be taught language. Hockett (1960) assembled a list of design features that he considered necessary for a system to be considered a true “language.” In general, animal communication systems lack important features included in that list such as: