Receptive Language before Expressive Language

Receptive Language before Expressive Language

Children’s ability to understand language develops faster than their ability to speak it. Receptive language is the ability to understand language, and expressive language is the ability to use language to communicate. If a mother tells her fifteen-month-old child to put the toy back in the toy chest, he may follow her instructions even though he can’t repeat them himself.

Behaviorist Theories (include The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis)

Basic Tenets

o Based on Skinner

o The idea that animal and human learning are similar based on Darwin’s theory.

o All behavior is a response to stimuli.

o No innate pre-programming for language learning at birth (Hadley 2001)

o Learning can also occur through imitation.

o Corrective feedback to correct bad habits

o Language is learned just as another behavior

Critique

o Chomsky criticized this theory.

o Does not explain the creativity of children in generating language. i.e how can kids overcome grammatical errors without their parents’ correction?

Environmental Influences on Language Acquisition

A major proponent of the idea that language depends largely on environment was the behaviorist B. F. Skinner. He believed that language is acquired through principles of conditioning, including association, imitation, and reinforcement.

According to this view, children learn words by associating sounds with objects, actions, and events. They also learn words and syntax by imitating others. Adults enable children to learn words and syntax by reinforcing correct speech.

Critics of this idea argue that a behaviorist explanation is inadequate. They maintain several arguments:

• Learning cannot account for the rapid rate at which children acquire language.

• There can be an infinite number of sentences in a language. All these sentences cannot be learned by imitation.

• Children make errors, such as overregularizing verbs. For example, a child may say Billy hitted me, incorrectly adding the usual past tense suffix -ed to hit. Errors like these can’t result from imitation, since adults generally use correct verb forms.

• Children acquire language skills even though adults do not consistently correct their syntax.

Neural Networks

Some cognitive neuroscientists have created neural networks, or computer models, that can acquire some aspects of language. These neural networks are not preprogrammed with any rules. Instead, they are exposed to many examples of a language. Using these examples, the neural networks have been able to learn the language’s statistical structure and accurately make the past tense forms of verbs. The developers of these networks speculate that children may acquire language in a similar way, through exposure to multiple examples.

Biological Influences on Language Acquisition

The main proponent of the view that biological influences bring about language development is the well-known linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky argues that human brains have a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate mechanism or process that allows children to develop language skills. According to this view, all children are born with a universal grammar, which makes them receptive to the common features of all languages. Because of this hard-wired background in grammar, children easily pick up a language when they are exposed to its particular grammar.

Evidence for an innate human capacity to acquire language skills comes from the following observations:

• The stages of language development occur at about the same ages in most children, even though different children experience very different environments.

• Children’s language development

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