Language Development

Language Development

Language Development

Compare and contrast nativist and learning theories of language development.

PSY 201 Discussion Language Development

Do you believe there are critical periods for language development? Why or why not? In thinking of about your response, consider at least two of the following: the case study on Genie (the girl isolated from human contact), bilingualism, deaf children who have their hearing restored by cochlear implants, recovery from brain injury to language areas, or other relevant research findings of interest to you.

DQ2 Nativist and Learning Theories

Compare and contrast nativist and learning theories of language development. Which perspective do you think best captures how we develop language?

Language development is thought to proceed by ordinary processes of learning in which children acquire the forms, meanings, and uses of words and utterances from the linguistic input.[citation needed] Children often begin reproducing the words that they are repetitively exposed to.[4] The method in which we develop language skills is universal; however, the major debate is how the rules of syntax are acquired.[citation needed] There are two quite separate major theories of syntactic development: an empiricist account by which children learn all syntactic rules from the linguistic input, and a nativist approach by which some principles of syntax are innate and are transmitted through the human genome.[citation needed]

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PSY 201 Discussion Language Development
PSY 201 Discussion Language Development

The nativist theory, proposed by Noam Chomsky, argues that language is a unique human accomplishment, and can be attributed to either “millions of years of evolution” or to “principles of neural organization that may be even more deeply grounded in physical law”.[5] Chomsky says that all children have what is called an innate language acquisition device (LAD). Theoretically, the LAD is an area of the brain that has a set of universal syntactic rules for all languages. This device provides children with the ability to make sense of knowledge and construct novel sentences with minimal external input and little experience. Chomsky’s claim is based upon the view that what children hear—their linguistic input—is insufficient to explain how they come to learn language.[citation needed] He argues that linguistic input from the environment is limited and full of errors. Therefore, nativists assume that it is impossible for children to learn linguistic information solely from their environment.[6] However, because children possess this LAD, they are in fact, able to learn language despite incomplete information from their environment. Their capacity to learn language is also attributed to the theory of universal grammar (UG), which posits that a certain set of structural rules are innate to humans, independent of sensory experience.[7] This view has dominated linguistic theory for over fifty years and remains highly influential, as witnessed by the number of articles in journals and books.[citation needed]