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>>