Theories of language acquisition.
The area of Language Acquisition was defined by
three main currents: Skinner's behaviorist theory, Chomsky's innatist theory,
and Piaget's theory of cognitive development. In this post we will discuss what
each of them stands for.
Noam Chomsky's The Innatist Theory
Chomsky defines linguistics as a set of rules that
seem to describe the structure of languages. Chomsky disagreed with the idea
that the human being was a tabula rasa, defended by the behaviorists and said
that the child comes to the world with already programmed linguistic abilities,
therefore the motor of the development of the child would be its innate
structures. For him the structural characteristics of languages depends on
the characteristics of the human brain, for this reason there are universal
common points in all languages. The evolution in which the child comes to use a
very complex structure, such as language, can not be explained by the
mechanisms of imitation or learning described by psychologists, the child often
produces utterly new speeches that he has never heard and that have been
created thanks to the innate capacity that Chomsky calls competence. For him
the speech of the child is a biological phenomenon, excluding the role of the
social and physical environment in this process.
Jean Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory
Piaget disagrees with the behaviorist theory and says
that Chomsky's theory is incomplete. To reinforce this thought he affirms that
the appearance and evolution of language depend on the cognitive evolution of
the child and that language is one of the manifestations of the semiotic function.
Thus, language develops following cognitive evolution. For Piaget, four factors
intervene in his performance: world experience, maturation, social environment
and balance.
Behaviorist theory of B. F. Skinner
Regarding the acquisition of language, Skinner says
that you need to consider two elements: the history of the reinforcements that
the subject experienced and the situation in which the behavior is performed.
This requires taking into account the practices and social environment in which
the child is inserted. Operant conditioning plays a fundamental role, in the
presence of a given stimulus, the individual emits a certain response, that is,
the environment that conditions the level of learning and is its relation with
the environment that explains the acquisition of language.
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Below, there is a video that explains more about this:
FURTHER READING:
Algumas notas sobre as teorias da aquisição da linguagem: Piaget, Chomsky, Skinner. <<http://hdl.handle.net/10400.12/1928>>
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