Language Learning in Early Childhood

Language Learning in Early Childhood Explaining first language acquisition

Overview • The behaviourist perspective • The innatist perspective • The critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) • Interactionist/developmental perspective

The behaviourist perspective

The behaviourist perspective → Say what I say • 1940s and 1950s Behaviourism: imitating and practising → importance to the environment

The behaviourist perspective → Say what I say • imitation and practice as the primary processes in language development • Imitation • Practise • Children imitate selectively

The behaviourist perspective → Say what I say • Patterns in language • Unfamiliar formulas • Question formation • Order of events

The innatist perspective

The innatist perspective • Noam Chomsky: • Languages are innate • Children are biologically programmed for language →They do not have to be taught

Difference to behaviorist perspective • Children know more about structure of language than they could be expected to learn • Their minds are not blank slates to be filled • BUT: innate ability to discover underlying rules of language system

Universal Grammar ( UG) • Human brain contains a limited set of rules for organizing language • Assumption that all languages have a common structural basis • No wrong hypothesis of how a language system might work • Only have to learn how language makes use of the UG

Example • John saw himself. • *Himself saw John. • Looking after himself bores John. • Could not be learned simply by imitating and practicing sentences • There must be an innate mechanism!

The Critical Period Hypothesis

The critical period hypothesis • Particular time (critical period) to learn certain knowledge or skills • Genetically programmed • Prove in history: • Victor • Genie

CPH: Victor • 1799: 12 year old boy found in the woods of France → feral child • Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (doctor) worked with him for 5 years • Progress in most areas but not in language

CPH: Genie • 13 year old girl from California • Isolated, neglected and abused by her parents • Was tied to a chair for 11 years and deprived from language • 1977: started to be educated and cared for • Social, cognitive progress but not in language

The critical period hypothesis • Still not enough prove for CPH • Research with deaf children who are born to hearing parents → late access to language • 5 – 10% of deaf children are born to deaf parents • 1990: Elissa Newport’s research with deaf children

CPH: Elissa Newport’s research • ASL (sign language) makes use of grammatical markers • Comparison of three groups • Native signers (children who learned ASL from birth) • Early learners (learned ASL between 4 and 6 years of age) • Late learners (learned ASL after the age of 12)

CPH: Newport’s results • No difference in some aspects of their use of ASL BUT • Native signers were more consistent with grammatical markers than early learners • Early learners were more consistent with grammatical markers than late learners • Prove for CPH whether language is oral or gestural

Interactionist/developmental perspective

Interactionist/ developmental perspectives Overview • learning from inside and out → innate learning ability and interaction with environment: • powerful learning mechanism in the brain • learning from experience • connection between cognitive development and language acquisition

Jean Piaget • development of children’s cognitive understanding: • object permanence • stability of quantities • logical inferencing • language = symbol system developing in childhood and expressing children’s knowledge

Lev Vygotsky • language develops mainly from social interaction • “zone of proximal development” → high level of knowledge and performance • language = thought → internalized speech; speech → results from social interaction

The importance of interaction • direct access to language • repetitions and paraphrases of adults • feeling of being understood through adults’ response

Connectionism • language learning = learning in general • language acquisition = association of words and phrases with objects and situations

Question What do you think about these different theories? Do they all work together or is there only one that is right?

Thank you for your attention!

Language Learning in Early Childhood