Language Acquisition Theorists

Noam Chomsky- Theory of nativism

• Noam Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited ability to learn any human language.
• He claims that certain linguistic structures that children use so accurately must be already imprinted on the child's mind.
• Chomsky believes that every child has a 'language acquisition device' which encodes the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child's brain.
• Children have then only to learn new vocab and apply the syntactic structures from the language acquisition device to form sentences.
• Chomsky points out that a child would not be able to learn a language only through imitation because the language spoken around them is highly irregular.
• Chomsky's theory applies to all languages.

B.F Skinner-Imitation and behaviourist theory

• Skinner is a behaviourist theorist that said children learn language through imitation.
• He conducted research on rats and pigeons which lead him to believe that language was just another form of learned behaviour.
• This brought him to the conclusion that children learn language through nurture rather than language acquisition devices.
• Another part of his theory is reinforcement, children learn from positive and negative reinforcement.

Jerome Bruner- Social interactionist theory

• He believed the child's social environment and particularly social interaction with other people were extremely important in the process of learning.
• Bruner believed that children think through 3 modes; ENACTIVE (actions), ICONIC (pictures) and SYMBOLIC (words and numbers). He believed this because actions, pictures and words are used by people around them in interactions and in performing tasks.
• He considered language as the most important cultural tool in children's cognitive growth and learning.

Jean Piaget- cognitive development theory

• The first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development.
• According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based.
• Piaget proposed 4 main stages of cognitive development; sensorimotor intelligence, preoperational thinking, concrete operational thinking and formal operational thinking.
• Each stage is correlated with an age period of childhood, but only approximately.
• The 4 stages always happen in the same order, no stage is ever skipped, each stage is a significant transformation of the previous stage and each later stage incorporates the earlier stages into itself.

By Joel Clark