Chapter 1: First Language Acquisition - created from Mind Map

Insights from Developmental Psychology:Focus on the Child. "Do children learn language in the same way they learn other things,such as how to tie their shoes or how to build with blocks,or do children have a special cognitive capacity for language learning?Insights from Sociology,Antropology,and Education:Focus on the Environment. Children develop the ability to understand and produce language because language is essential for social interaction.Communicative competemce,the knowledge of what to say to whom under what circustances.Language always occurs in a social context, and the meaning of many utterances depends on the context.

Behaviorism Chonsky B.F.Skinner behaviorism could not account for learning in general. Language is complex, and determining just how it is that children develop the capacity to understand and speak the language that sorraunds them is no simple task. Insights from Linguistics:Focus on the Language Chonsky has observed that it is necessary to develop a theory of language before attempting to develop a theory of language acquisition.He also developed a theory referred to as generative grammar because it is an attempt to develop a small set of rules that could be used to produce,or generate,any sentence of the language. Universal Grammar Chonsky's answer to the question of how children acquire language is that children have a innate capacity for language,what he at first called language acquisition device. How children form Linguistic Rules Children do get evidence of how language works from the models provided by the language of adults and others around.Studies of child language acquisition show that children develop the rules of language,quickly, they acquire the language despite receiving only a limited amount of input,and they do it without much correction.Children must have a built-in capacity for language. Children's Error Chonsky's claim that language is innate comes from the fact that there are certain kinds of errors that children never make.The fact that children never make certain kind of errors suggests that children are born with some innate knowledge of the rules of language,and their language attempts never violate those basic rules.A child may make mistakes with the parts of language that are unpredictable,like regular verbs.But children dont make mistakes in some areas where mistakes would be expected. Language and the Brain Linguists study language because it provides a window on the mind.The best evidence that humans are born with an innate knowledge of things like nouns and verbs is that all human languages have something like nouns and verbs.The innate knowledge children have allows them to undersatnd and produce sentences,but it doesn't allow them to explain how they do it.The implicit nature of linguistic rules is not limited to children.Many adults just know whether or not something sounds right, eventhough they cant explain how they know.

Chapter 1: First Language Acquisition