Chapter Two
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
Why do people study language acquisition???
Take a minute and think about it?
Language development is part of the human development.
It helps early childhood educators to understand the process and then facilitate it.
It helps speech therapist and special educators insights into normal and other than normal processes.
It helps understand out own behavior. It helps in establish a link between
thoughts and language because it is parallel to the cognitive development.
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
Proponent of the theory: Skinner When: 1950 Basic assumption:According to Skinner, all behaviors are learned
or operant. The resultant behavior change is called “learning” or “operant conditioning”.
As a result, language is a behavior that can be learned through stimulus and response. The strength of stimulus-response bond determines the probability of occurrence of the this behavior.
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
Reinforcer: any event that increase the
probability of occurrence of a preceding
behavior.
Punisher: any event that decrease the
probability of occurrence of preceding
behavior.
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
Skinner’s view of language acquisition:
Skinner discuss the language acquisition
process in his text “Verbal Behavior”,
(1957). He believed that Language is like
any other behavior that will be learned from
the surrounding environment. As a result,
children will learn the language when
parents model and reinforce the acquisition
process.
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
Complex behaviors are learned through
shaping chaining (All behaviors are gradually modified) (a sequence of
behavior in such a way that each step serves as a stimulus for the next)
For Example:
Shaping: “I want a cookie , please” –> “Want cookie”
Chaining: “ I eat cookie” “ She eat cookie” “ She drink water”
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
Chomsky (1959) argued against Skinner’s
Verbal Behavior when he pointed out
several inadequacies.
1- parents only reinforce a small
percentage of their children’s utterances
because they ignore grammatical errors
and reinforce the truthfulness of the
utterance instead.Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
2- Imitation may account for a small
number of syntactic structures and
occurs infrequently after age 2. Why??
- Adult speech provides a poor model
because it is full of false starts, slips of
tongue, etc.
- Imitation can not account for structures
like “I eated”
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
3-The child can not possibly learn all the
sentences he produces from imitation
only because he can not experience all
possible structures of the language.
However, the generative quality of the
language suggests underlying rules
(Universal Grammar) of language
formation.
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani
4- Skinner emphasized production and
minimized comprehension and
underlying cognitive processes. Thus,
Chomsky considered skinner’s model
superficial because it did not consider
what the child brings to the learning
tasks.
Miss.Mona AL-Kahtani