Because of the fact Psycholinguistics is not an easy subject to deal with, it was necessary to explain all the concepts, ideas, theories that have been previously exposed in the blog, and now, we are ready to understand L1 and L2 acquisition which are the most important topics to be considered. Therefore, in order to comprehend how we acquire a language, several theories have tried to explain this complex process, considering diverse aspects of language, society, age, etc which can sometimes be mutually exclusive, but can also be complementary theories.
Some of the most important theoretical positions are: Behaviourism, which considers language as a set of habits, with associations formed between words and the real-world states/objects which they refer to. In simple words, it is principally a theory of learning based upon the relationship between an external stimulus and the individual’s response to it through acquired behaviour. One influential author in the behaviourist position is B.F Skinner, who claimed that a child acquires language through imitating adult utterances and based his theory on the ideas of operant conditioning and negative/positive reinforcement.
Empiricism claims that language is acquired through extended exposure to adult speech and a desire to make sense of the environment. In other words, it is stated that all knowledge is acquired through experience and that the speech to which the child is exposed provides linguistic information of sufficient quality and quantity to support acquisition.
Nativism considers there is an innate language faculty, which is fully developed at birth or programmed into the maturation process. In other words, it is the view that language is genetically transmitted. The nativist position is closely related to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, which, in simple words, is understood as a set of innate principles and adjustable parameters (lexical categories, structure-dependency, etc) that are common to all human languages. If you want to read more about this theory, there is an absorbing paper called Nature, Nurture and Universal Grammar.
Cognitivism affirms that a general cognitive predisposition equips infants to trace patterns in the miscellaneous language which they encounter. In addition to the previous general idea, some important cognitive views are that: a child can not express concepts in language unless it has previously developed them; both language and cognition are part of a staged maturation programme, in which they operate in parallel, supporting each other; innate cognitive tendencies can predispose us to find certain patterns in language data and to adopt certain strategies in response to language data, to apply individual learning styles to language data; the child’s limited cognitive capacity renders it more sensitive to the features of language than it might be before or later.
“Less is more” theory, closely related to the cognitivist one, states that the cognitive limitations of the infant equip it for cracking the language code, because it can be an advantage in terms of language acquisition that they notice only the most general syntactic patterns and only manage to hold a few words of an utterance in short-term memory.
Social-interactionism claims that language is acquired through the infant’s desire to interact with its carers. In other words, it emphasises the parts played by the child’s environment, its social instincts, its pragmatic needs and its relationship with the carer. A very important representative of the social-interactionist thinking was Lev Vygotsky. He was a Russian psychologist, who saw the child’s development as a progress from dependency to independence, since the adult offers support, recently termed scaffolding (looked at the representation below), which is gradually withdrawn as a task becomes more familiar and as the child becomes more practised.Other important representatives are Jerome Bruner and M.A.K Halliday.
Connectionism has raised the possibility that language is acquired by a process of association and without the need of cognitive pattern-recognition skills.A good example of this model is Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP).
0 comments:
Post a Comment