How Do People Learn (Language)?

Nature and nurture both play various roles in children’s language development. Nature is a child’s inherited genetics and characteristics. Nurture is the persuasive influence a child develops from their environmental surroundings. The two have created many debates on whether one has more influence on a child’s language development than the other. In this essay I will discuss, the roles nature and nurture play in children’s language development, how they structure communication and the theoretical debate of their impact.

First, children¡¯s acquisition of language is an innate mechanism that enables a child to analyze language and extract the basic rules of grammar, granted by Chomsky. It basically states that humans are born with a language acquisition device that, the ability to learn a language rapidly as children. However, there is one important controversy in language acquisition concerns how we acquire language; since Chomsky fails to adequately explain individual differences. From the behaviorists¡¯ perspectives, the language is learned like other learned behaviors. It is learned through operant

The case of “Genie” is a tragic look at the effects of child abuse and neglect on childhood development. Genie’s case was particularly extreme, as she lived the first 13 years of her life in isolation and confinement. With little to no human interaction throughout her entire life, she developed no language skills. Researchers were extremely interested in this case, as it gave them a chance to explore two theories of language development. One theory is Noam Chomsky’s view that children are born with an innate ability to learn and understand language. Chomsky termed this structure in our brain the “Language Acquisition Device” (LAD). An alternate theory by Eric Lenneberg stated that language development is a result of our environment, and stressed the importance of critical periods. Lenneberg believed that the critical period for language development only lasted until around 12 years of age, and inability to develop language during these critical periods would result in major deficits.

The debate between many researchers is the argument of whether nature or nurture play a more important role in development. In this essay I will be looking into both aspects of nature and nurture focusing specifically on their influence towards language development in children. A main controversial question I will be looking into is the question of whether are we born already equipped with mechanisms which help us to learn language, or is language learned throughout a child’s environment by, for example, imitation and repetition? Studies done by some opposing researchers claim to show that nature and nurture promote language development

The film (Chomsky) claim that acquiring language is different from kinds of learning. What does he mean?

Therefore, from the behaviourist approach, language acquisition can be seen as a stimulus-response process. Children learn language by immitation and analogy. The roles of imitation, repetition, reinforcement, and motivation are essential in learning the language. The First Language Acquisition is thus the result of nature which based on practicing.

Language is a cognitive function that most of us take for granted. It starts from early on, some say at conception, and it develops in complexity as we get older. It is an essential part of communication and without it its development would be greatly hindered. This natural process requires complex structures and reasoning, the bringing together of sounds and words to develop concrete ideas and thoughts. In this paper we will discuss the components of language and how it relates to cognitive processes.

There are several theories regarding language development. Work by Chomsky, Piaget and Kuhl are critical. Studies by Chomsky, as examined by Albery, Chandler, Field, Jones, Messer, Moore and Sterling (2009); Deloache, Eisenberg & Siegler (2003) argued for the innateness of language acquisition due to its complexity. Development is assisted by a language acquisition device (LAD) and universal grammar both of which holding the propensity for commonalities throughout all languages. LAD is the key to the Syntax rule. The knowledge to master the rules is held unconsciously. Chomsky concludes exposure through auditory channels as being the only requirement for learning. Arguably Kuhl (2010) writes infantile exposure to language through auditory channels only, does not contribute effectively to learning indicating the importance of human interaction. Piaget, as discussed by Ault (1977) postulated language as not being part of the earliest stages of development. Signifying within sensorimotor stage, between birth and two years, the child’s development is too reflexive. Gleitman, Fridlund and Reisberg (2004) discuss the critical period hypothesis and suggest the young brain being more suited to acquisition than the adult brain. Lenneberg (1967) (as cited in Gleitman et al 2004) advocates, brain maturation closes language acquisition capacity window. Kuhl (2010) identified, within the critical period babies develop

In the other hand, behaviorists view language as complex and leaned skill, much like playing piano and dancing. B.F. Skinner argued that language represents nothing more than chains of responses acquired through reinforcement. Putting differently, children learn though process of reinforcement. For example, baby babbles “mama” the mother happily reward the baby with a hug and kisses and eventually will push the baby to say “mama” more and more; due to these reward children are motivated to repeat the behavior, thereby shaping their language and ensuring their development. Children’s language is being built up, this describe a way in which children environmental experiences influence and improve their language skills. Also that’s why parents

Numerous theories try to explain the process of language acquisition. These theories fall into one of two camps. The environmentalist (or connectionist) theory of language acquisition asserts that language is acquired through environmental factors (Halvaei et al. 811). Theorists in this camp believe that a child learns language by gaining information from the outside world and then forming associations between words and objects. The nativist (or rationalist) approach, on the other hand, asserts that it is innate factors that determine language acquisition. Noam Chomsky, often described as “the father of modern linguistics”, falls into this camp as he believes that speech is the result of hidden rules of language that are hidden somewhere in the brain (Rahmani and Abdolmanafi 2111). Steven Pinker, a colleague of Chomsky, is a renowned psychologist, cognitive scientist and linguist who discusses his own theories on language acquisition in his book Words and Rules.

correct in the sense of the ability to learn language by a built in or

Nature or, in other words, heredity refers to traits that are inherited or genetic. Linguist Noam Chomsky is a strong advocate of this perspective. He has spent a lot of time on evolving a theory of grammar that is called universal grammar. Chomsky believed that language is innate, or in other words we are born with a capacity for language. Chomsky suspected there is an optimal learning age, between the ages of 3 to 10 where a child is the most likely to learn a language in its entirety and grasp fluency. The child does not need a prompt to begin language acquisition, it happens on its own. If a child is around

Some linguistic models try to explain the development of second language acquisition. The three most common models are (1) the Universal Grammar Model, (2) the Competition Model, and (3) the Monitor Model. The Universal Grammar Model refers to the system of principles, conditions, and rules that are properties or elements of all human languages. At the same time, each language has grammatical rules that vary from one language to another. Thus, Chomky states that different languages have a limited possibility of different grammatical structures (1975). Therefore, second language learners base their second language acquisition on universal principles common to all languages, and on the force of the particular rules of each language. All of those can be concluded that as a human, especially as children, we have vary form of rules in language, in this case is second language.

Chomsky suggested that children are born with ‘transformational grammar’ which is the ability to translate the surface structure of sentences into deeper meanings. That is to say, the arrangement of words in a sentence are translated into deeper meanings of those superficial words – the grammatical relationship between them is what makes human language acquisition distinct from any superficial communication that Chimps were using via ASL. Evidence for this comes from the speed at which language development in humans takes place. Language appears to develop naturally through the speech that the child hears and the order of language acquisition appears universal. Children’s speech errors are a case in point here, they are unlikely to ever hear the word ‘wented’ as a past tense of ‘went’ e.g. ‘I wented to the zoo with mummy’.  This is the child’s attempt to use LAD to apply rules of grammar, a cognitively active process that was never apparent in any of the chimpanzee language studies. (Chomsky 1965)

A child must achieve competence with an infinite language based on a finite number of heard sentences. This is the essence of Noam Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus" argument. As originally presented, it made a case for nativism, forcing empiricist theories to explain how such competence is achievable. In Stephen Pinker's Language Learnability and Language Development, he uses learnability both as a challenge to theories of language acquisition, and as a heuristic for evaluating them. Terrence Deacon, in The Symbolic Species, while dismissive of most of Chomskyan linguistics, still sees the learnability problem as a challenge to any theory that hopes to explain human linguistic knowledge. I will begin