Children's Language Development Key 4 Theorists

Children's Language Development Key 4 Theorists

1. Behaviourist theory

   • Positive and Negative Reinforcement
     • positive: what they're saying is correct
       • Negative: told what they're saying is wrong to correct it
     • Rats and Pigeons
       • Through repetition they can learn behaviour
         • Thought it could be passed onto kids
       • Imitation
         • Problem is that it can be seen as imitation instead of learning and creativity
           • Cant say kids learn through imitation because they create new utterances/words
         • Operant Conditioning
           • Reward and Punishment
             • Particular language behaviours
   • BF Skinner - Verbal Behaviour (U.S)
     • Problems: if they only learn language through imitation then they would learn 'baby talk' straight away
       • They would learn faster, but they have to actually extract grammatical rules and learn by trial and error about exceptions
         • They wouldn't ever be creative and make new words: add morphemes such as 'swimmed'
       • Children remain 'stubborn' about corrections

2. Innatism/Nativist Theory

   • Noam Chomsky 1960's
     • believes we are born with the capacity to speak and believes in chiildren's creativity
       • Needs caregivers to give stimulus
     • Eric Lennerberg - The Critical period hypothesis (worked with Chomsky)
       • LAD: there's a switch in the brain but it needs to be turned on or they wont ever learn language
       • 'use it or lose it'
       • Activated by caregiver input - has to be done by early puberty (10 years)
       • LAD: Language Acquisition Device
         • Hearing - The brain (LAD) extracts grammatical rules from what it hears (the stimulus) the child learns and progresses
         • Universal Grammar: extracting rules from speech they hear
           • All languages on the globe (in his opinion) share the same deep grammatical structure
             • All babies extract the same rules
       • The Poverty of Stimulus
         • thought parents grammar was not good enough quality, so doesn't explain how their children learn so accurately
         • Overgeneralisations
           • Children take a rule for a regular verb/plural etc and they mis-apply it 'mans' instead of men
           • Creativity through new words they could never have heard e.g horsey man
     • Problems: 1) no acknowledgement of languge as a social expression with social functions and contexts
       • 2) the 'feral child' evidence might be flawed - it's quite possible that a child has suffered enormous trauma and aren't able to communicate
         • 3) Cognitive theory tells us that there are other 'communal' areas of the brain which 'puzzle' problems and don't necessarily need a 'LAD'

3. Cognitivist Theory

   • Most popular theory
   • Suggests language is just another code/puzzle for the brain to work out
   • Jean Piaget - language is part of cognition
   • Lee Vygotsky
     • Says language has 2 functions - thoughts - communication
       • 'What a child can do with help today he can do alone tomorrow'
     • Seriation
       • Have to grasp he concept before they can use the language (time, past tense, future tense, adverbs)
       • Putting things in order
     • Object Permanence
       • Understand that an object is permanent and has an existence of its own
       • Begin to label everything
         • leads to the lexical stage called the ;naming explosion' where they constantly ask 'whats that'
   • The brain has a general puzzling device - Aitchison
   • PROBLEMS
     • Says language is a puzzle but cant explain how children learn language in the same order
       • More interested in interaction than self expression
       • Cognitivism seems to deal well with language development on a simple level rather than advanced grammar
       • Seriation and language contradict eachother
   • Stephen Pinkers Principles and Parameters Theory
     • Says once we start to learn our native language our brains begin to switch certain features on and sets them

4. Social Interaction Theory

   • Input theory - caregiver giving language input to the child
     • Ineraction is what helps the child to grasp and develop meanings
       • Helps them understand practical realities (pre-school_
   • Built on Behaviourist theory
   • L.A.S.S
     • interaction helps 'scaffold' children's language
     • Language Acquisition Support System
     • Children is treated as a conversational participant
       • Cues and Adjacency pairs (tag questions)
         • greetings and replys. compliment and acceptance.
         • farewell and reply. question and answer
       • Parentese/Motherese
         • Conversational participants even before the child can speak. (baby talk)
   • Jerome Bruner
     • Says it helps children develop : turntaking, pragmatics and NVC
     • Says slowed speech and simpler instructions and vocabulary are how to teach children languae
   • Kathy Snow
     • Developed 'Motherese'
       • Developed Bruner's theory further
   • RECASTING - parents repeat what child has said but with corrections and repeat it.