Language Acquisition Theories: A brief overview

Hafiz Ahmad Bilal

Department of English, University of Sargodha

PhD Semester 1

Applied Linguistics

Dr Ijaz Asghar

Assistant Professor
 Language Acquisition Theories: A brief overview

It all starts in history, with some ancient thinkers who were curious about how the

universe worked, in this case, how humans were able to learn language. Those philosophers

came to the conclusion with "armchair psychology" (sitting and thinking about the problem), that

humans could learn languages because of their ability to learn knowledge and conceptual skills.

They assumed that language was an innate ability with which humans were born. For instance,

Plato thought the word mapping in one way or another was also innate.

For over 12 centuries, scholars who studied Sanskrit, a former language used more than

3,000 years ago in today's India, had debated whether it was a thing passed down by the

generation and learned from pre-established conventions to recognize and use the correct

meaning of words in Sanskrit. (For example, a kid learns a word ‘horse’ because he hears older

speakers talk about horses, or if it was innate ability a child learns that word for horse).Later

philosophers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes joined the language party, arguing that

knowledge (and, in Locke's case, language) is derived from abstracted sense of experiences.

The 1950s marked the beginning of the new era of child language acquisition. There's a

popular dispute between Skinner, who argued and propounded what was later called behaviourist

account of learning language, and Chomsky, who was of the view that language learning is not

possible only through listening. There must be a system in learner’s head that allows the

language to be processed in a particular manner to enable the learner to construct a grammar with

a very meagre input of language you are exposed to. The debate between Chomsky and his

supporters, who believe that innate knowledge of the language is a must to learn a language, and
different adversaries who consider that learner can actually learn only what he hears, has never

ended and is a hot debate that has attracted the attention of linguists even today.

The simplest way to study the language-learning process is to simply watch and listen

when kids talk. Researcher parents for instance Stern and Stern, 1907; Leopold, 1939–1949,

reported on their own child's statements in the early studies. The goal of the diarist was to list all

the new words produced by the child. Diary studies were then replaced, generally for a period of

years, with audio and video samples of talk by a number of children. The longitudinal study of

Adam, Eve and Sarah by Brown (1973) are by far the most celebrated of these contemporary

works.

Behaviourist Accounts

This view posited that language learning was like a habit formation (Skinner, 1957). It

was based on the concept of stimulus and response. Up to the second half of 1950s, language

was thought to be yet another trait that could be learned using general behavioural rules like

associative learning, reinforcement, and imitation, which were in line with the psychological

theories of the time. Consider associative learning, which is a common mechanism of language

learning where a different response is linked to a specific stimulus. The use of association

appears to be a usual way to describe the children’s vocabulary learning processes – tags are

taught to children by relating a spoken word with a recognizable entity. Quine’s (1960) popular

theoretical puzzle emphasizes the issue: Imagine you're a foreigner with no local language

knowledge in a foreign country. One native says 'gavagai' when he points to a distant rabbit. You

try to combine a specific response with the new "gavagai" stimulus, but you should choose

which stimulus? The rabbit entirely? Or just its tail? Or its ears? The event that is taking place?

The opportunities are unlimited and associative learning resolves just a few things. In addition,
copying and encouragement were suggested as instruments through which young learners could

acquire the language "habits”. Nevertheless, the most in-depth examination of the ways of

learning language shows that none of the mechanisms mechanism is enough to achieve the

required level of learning a language. In this broad sense, learners are capable of learning a

language they have been exposed to. Do children, on the other hand, model their sentences after

the ones they hear? Some do, but many children do not follow in their footsteps (Bloom et al.,

1974). Furthermore, children who imitate do not acquire language much faster than children who

do not imitate. And children who imitate on a regular basis do not mimic anything they hear,

selectively they are just imitating the sections of the phrases which they can handle at that point

in time. Imitation is, therefore, driven by both the child and the sentences heard by the child.

What about other people's reactions to the sentences of these children? Do children pick up on

the types of sentences that their parents use? Parents may reward their children for producing

grammatically correct sentences while punishing them for producing grammatically incorrect

sentences. As a result, the child will be motivated to make correct sentences while being

prevented from making incorrect ones.

This account has a couple of flaws. The first according to Brown and Hanlon (1970), is

that, in most cases, parents do not give response to the utterances of their children, based on their

grammatical correctness. Parents are more likely to refer to the substance of their children's

sentences than to the structure of their sentences. Further, though children's correct and incorrect

sentences were handled in different ways, it is also up to children to figure out what distinguishes

correct sentences from incorrect sentences. For instance, if the child utters the phrase "I coloured

the wall blue," grammatically correct, and the parents reacted positively (thus ignores the

troubling content of the sentence and concentrates on its structure), the child still needs to
understand the generalisation process of the sentence. In order to recognize an analogous term,

the parents have to comprehend the designs that result in a sentence. For example they can tell

that “I saw the wall blue” is grammatically incorrect in contrast to another sentence “I pounded

the clay flat” that is correct. To say it simply, much inductive work still needs to be done even if

children are given a number of the right sentences to generalize.

The publication of Noam Chomsky's study of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour in 1959

gave a devastating blow to his behaviourist view of language. Adult language usage, according

to Chomsky, cannot be properly defined in terms of actions or responses. Each person's

understanding and use of language is based on a set of abstract rules, these are the laws that

children follow as they learn a new language. When the problem of language acquisition is seen

in this way, the solution needs to be entirely different.

 Nativist Accounts

Chomskian perspectives are based on the assumption that without explicit instruction the

children learn a subtle and abstract language system, without sufficient input information to

support the induction of those specific principles, in fact. This refers to Plato’s account of the

issue of the poverty of the stimulus. Chomsky (1965) further claimed that, if the input provides

little information to explain the children’s learning a language, then there are innate knowledge

of structures and language-specific learning procedures are supporting the process of language

acquisition. This is taken as a priori knowledge in terms of the principles and parameters

determining the number of possible human languages according to the theory of Universal

Grammar (UG).

UG is supposed to be part of the human knowledge. The principles of Universal

Grammar postulates a framework for language characteristics, the data with which the child
comes in contact is often left open with several options to be decided. For instance, freedom of

the choice of arrangement of words is a variation parameter. Certain languages, such as English,

have precise word order requirements, a few others (Russian, Japanese) enumerate a limited

number of instructions that are permissible. For learners to set their language parameters, the

input from a given language is required. A significant characteristic of the theory is the fact that a

character can lead to a bunch of grammatical characteristics apparently not related to the

language. The null-subject parameter, for instance, has several functions: whether in all

declarative sentences explicit subjects are required (in English yes, in Italian no), if there are

expletive elements such as "it" in "it appears" or "there" in "there is" (in English yes, in Italian

no), is it permissible to invert subjects freely in simple sentences? (in English yes , in Italian no),

and so forth. The hypothesis is that the information needed to set the null–subject parameter

causes all of these elements of a child's grammar to align at the same time (Hyams, 1989).

At the moment, there is debate about whether such predictions are backed by child

language evidence. Furthermore, according to the Minimalist Programme, the quest for common

features and principles in a linguistic theory is strengthened via stating the fact that inherited

linguistic information is the most efficient method available (Chomsky, 1993). However, innate

understanding of the concepts fundamental to a language is insufficient to explain how a child

acquires a language. How does he know what is a subject or a nominal he learns in a particular

language? Of course a child needs to determine in their language the subjects and verbs before

deciding whether both are precisely arranged in the language, and prior to applying any innate

knowledge they possess about the structure of language. As a result, children need learning

procedures in addition to intrinsic syntactic awareness, which may be language-specific. One

example of a potential language learning way is a collection of rules to connect semantic and
syntactic categories (Pinker, 1989). As per this theory, children have the knowledge by birth that

doers are probable subjects in sentences, etc. It's as simple as classifying the agent based on

context. The connecting principles enable them to deduce from the sentence's subject that the

word used to refer to the subjects. They are then able to take over their inherent knowledge of

how these elements are structured. There is again controversy about whether children's language

data support such assumptions. For example, ergative languages do not link agents directly to

subjects, however small children can easily acquire them (Ochs, 1982).

Social / Cognitive Accounts

There are essentially two assertions in the nativist position: (1) at least certain language-

specific rules of arrangement and are distinct from other cognitive systems; (2) These rules are

procedures developed biologically, i.e., centred on children and not the environment of the child

themselves that guide the implementation of those principles. It is worth-noting that both the

claims go side by side, they don't have to. It's possible that the concepts underlying linguistic

understanding are both unique to language and applied all-round learning mechanisms in a

general way. While such mechanisms should be more complex than those offered by behavioural

mechanisms. More recently, this is called a social or cognitive account of linguistic learning

(Bohn et al., 2018). We can, for example, often guess their intention by examining the actions

where they look, how they stand, how they move hands and faces. This information could help

young children reduce their hypothesis on what a lexical item denotes. Baldwin (1993) observes

when a speaker speaks a new word, looks at an object, a child will interpret the utterer's words as

referring to that thing despite the fact that the child is not looking at that particular object. In

simple words, kids can use common signals to steer their language guesses.
 The language itself can also be used by children to guess meanings. If, as Gleitman and

her colleagues discovered, the structures of sentences kids listen to signals their meanings to a

certain degree (Fisher et al., 1991). In a process known as "syntactic bootstrapping," kids might

use the structure to make meanings. Naigles et al. (1993) find that there is some testimony that

even young kids can be syntactically bootstrap into language. When children first begin to talk,

they do not sound like adults, there is obviously some work to be done in terms of growth. What

kind of work is needed, specifically? Some nativists believe that children already possess all of

the grammatical categories and syntactic concepts. But their operating system is no efficient. In

that respect, there is no change of grammatical system in the development work to be done.

Another point of view proposes that during growth, the language radically shifts from one

system that is constructed on semantic categories to a system grounded on syntax.

This transformation could be driven by inherent linking rules or dictated by growth and

development. The transition, on the other hand, may be the product of children making an

inductive leap based on the linguistic data accessible to them, in combination mostly with

cognitive and interpersonal skills. Both social and cognitive accounts of language acquisition

depend on this inductive leap. While cognitive underpinnings are unquestionably important, they

may not be adequate for the development of linguistic abilities. Iverson and Goldin-Meadow

(2005) conclude that the onset of sign language combinations þ that express two elements of a

proposition called "open þ point at box, for example, occurs many months well before onset of

two-word combinations called "open box, implying that the capability to articulate two semantic

components cognitively isn't the ultimate sticking point for two-word combinations. More than

probably, the problem with linguistic patterns is the difficulty of extracting from the input.
 According to social and cognitive accounts, linguistic feedback provides enough

information that learners hear to trigger a grammatical structure, predominantly in the sense of

the positive communal surroundings in which they reside. According to extensive studies, adults

change the way they speak to their children. Children's speech, often referred to as mother's or

child-directed speech, is lenient, shorter, higher in length, exaggerated in intonation, more

grammatical and content-oriented than adult talk (Snow, 1972).  Newport et al. (1977) found that

a child pays special consideration and attention to this input and interpret it in accordance with

his own preferences or operating principles, for instance, learners are more careful about the ends

of words. Even so, one issue with suggesting motherese as a language-learning device for

children is that child-directed speech may not always be applicable to all contexts. In several

contexts, learners contribute as over-hearers rather than as receivers in communicative

interactions and the language the children are exposed to will not be studied and understood in an

identical manner.

However, as Ochs and Schieffelin (1995) suggest, in such linguistic and ethnic contexts,

children be proficient operators of their grammar systems in approximately the same periods.

Given the robustness of expression, these findings indicate that there could be several

evolutionary routes to all the same result. The conundrum that leaners do not generally obtain

streamlined input is very interesting that kids can simplify themselves. For example, due to their

limited memory, young children may be unable to remember whole sequences of words or all of

the sounds that make up individual words. As a consequence, according to the theory of "less is

more" they perform the necessary analytic work to derive linguistic recurring patterns from a

smaller, refined set of data (Elman, 1993). This filtering can be exactly what children need to
reach their language systems. Furthermore, it is a universal practice that kids worldwide

presumably contribute to the linguistic situation to the same extent.

Theories summed up (adopted from Dalia 2021)

Baldwin, D.A. (1993). Infants’ ability to consult the speaker for clues to word reference. J. Child

Lang. 20 (2), 395–418.

Bloom, L., Hood, L., & Lightbown, P. (1974). Imitation in language development: if, when, and

why. Cogn. Psychol. 6 (3), 380–420.

Bohn, M., Zimmermann, L., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2018). The social-cognitive basis of

infants’ reference to absent entities. Cognition. 177, 41–48.

Brown, R. (1973). A First Language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Brown, R., & Hanlon, C. (1970). Derivational complexity and order of acquisition in child

speech. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the Development of Language. New York:

Wiley.

Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of B.F. Skinner’s verbal behavior. Language. 35 (1), 26–58.

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Chomsky, N. (1993). A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory. MIT Occasional Papers in

Linguistics No. 1. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. Cambridge.

Dalia, H. (2021). Learning Theory Matrix. Retrieved from Learning Theory Matrix (icdst.org)

Elman, J.L. (1993). Learning and development in neural networks: the importance of starting

small. Cognition. 48 (1), 71–99.

Fisher, C., Gleitman, L., & Gleitman, H. (1991). On the semantic content of subcategorization

frames. Cogn. Psychol. 23, 331–392.

Hyams, N. (1989). The null subject parameter in language acquisition. In O. A. Jaeggli, & K. J.

Safir (Eds.), The Null Subject Parameter, Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic

Theory, 15. Dordrecht: Springer.

Psychol Sci. 16(5):367-71. doi: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.01542.x. PMID: 15869695.

Naigles, L., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (1993). Syntactic bootstrapping in verb acquisition. In

E. Dromi (Ed.), Language and Cognition: A developmental perspective.

Newport, E.L., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L.R. (1977). Mother, I’d rather do it myself: some

effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In C. E. Snow, & C. A. Ferguson (Eds.),

Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition. Cambridge: CUP.

Ochs, E. (1982). Talking to children in Western Samoa. Language in Society, 11, 77-104.

Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. (1995). The impact of language socialization on grammatical

development. In P, Fletcher, & B. MacWhinney (Eds.), The Handbook of Child

Language. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and Cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge:

MIT Press.

Quine, W. O. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Skinner, B.F. (1957). Verbal behaviour. Cambridge: CUP.

Snow, C.E. (1972). Mothers’ speech to children learning language. Child Dev. 43, 549–565.