LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Presenting

PIONEERS OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

FIVE THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

What is Language Development?

Language development is a slow process that starts during early childhood, allowing children to grasp the spoken word and communicate.

The emergence of language in human children comes after a period of significant development of the brain. This term also applies to the origin of languages and why humans developed language as a communication tool in the first place.

Language development is a vast field with contributions from various disciplines. These include linguists, anthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists, neurologists, and computer scientists, to name a few.

Daniel Everett’s Theory

Language Scratches the Communicative Itch

Daniel Everett’s Theory

Picking up and using a language is something, inventing it from scratch is a whole another thing. Here come the homo Erectus! The language phenomenon may not have started with us, homo sapiens.

HOMO ERECTUS

According to linguist Daniel Everett, nearly two million years have passed since “homo Erectus” first started uttering meaningful sounds.

HOMO ERECTUS

Chomsky’s Nativist Linguistic Theory: Universal Grammar

B.F. Skinner Behaviorist Theory

Vygotsky’s Social Interactionist Theory

Piaget’s Constructivist Theory

Beyond just language development, Piaget’s theory focuses on understanding the nature of intelligence itself. He defines four stages that cognitive development goes through:

Sensorimotor stage: birth to 2 years Preoperational stage: 2 to 7 years Concrete operational stage: 7 to 11 years Formal operational stage: 12 and up

According to Vygotsky’s social development model, socio-cultural interactions come first, then cognition and language development.

Behavior theorists posit that language development is a learned behavior. When babies first speak, they are trying to imitate the behavior of their parents and adults around them.

Behavior theorists posit that language development is a learned behavior. When babies first speak, they are trying to imitate the behavior of their parents and adults around them.

“You need communication with symbols, not just grunts,” says Everett. “They accomplished too much for this to simply be the sort of communication that we see in other species without symbols.”

Linguist Noam Chomsky thinks language is innate.

The most significant human invention is arguably language.

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