Chapter Two Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani

Why do people study language acquisition??? Take a minute and think about it?

 Language development is part of the human development.  It helps early childhood educators to understand the process and then facilitate it.  It helps speech therapist and special educators insights into normal and other than normal processes.  It helps understand out own behavior.  It helps in establish a link between thoughts and language because it is parallel to the cognitive development. Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani

 Proponent of the theory: Skinner  When: 1950  Basic assumption: According to Skinner, all behaviors are learned or operant. The resultant behavior change is called “learning” or “operant conditioning”. As a result, language is a behavior that can be learned through stimulus and response. The strength of stimulus-response bond determines the probability of occurrence of the this behavior. Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani

 Reinforcer: any event that increase the probability of occurrence of a preceding behavior.  Punisher: any event that decrease the probability of occurrence of preceding behavior. Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani

 Skinner’s view of language acquisition: Skinner discuss the language acquisition process in his text “Verbal Behavior”, (1957). He believed that Language is like any other behavior that will be learned from the surrounding environment. As a result, children will learn the language when parents model and reinforce the acquisition process. Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani

 Complex behaviors are learned through shaping chaining (All behaviors are gradually modified) (a sequence of behavior in such a way that each step serves as a stimulus for the next) For Example: Shaping: “I want a cookie, please” –> “Want cookie” Chaining: “ I eat cookie”  “ She eat cookie” “ She drink water” Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani

 Chomsky (1959) argued against Skinner’s Verbal Behavior when he pointed out several inadequacies. 1- parents only reinforce a small percentage of their children’s utterances because they ignore grammatical errors and reinforce the truthfulness of the utterance instead. Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani

2- Imitation may account for a small number of syntactic structures and occurs infrequently after age 2. Why?? - Adult speech provides a poor model because it is full of false starts, slips of tongue, etc. - Imitation can not account for structures like “I eated” Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani

3-The child can not possibly learn all the sentences he produces from imitation only because he can not experience all possible structures of the language. However, the generative quality of the language suggests underlying rules (Universal Grammar) of language formation. Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani

4- Skinner emphasized production and minimized comprehension and underlying cognitive processes. Thus, Chomsky considered skinner’s model superficial because it did not consider what the child brings to the learning tasks. Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani