Mentalist &

Behaviorist theory of

SLA

Prepared By: TUMANA, WJ

Language acquisition theories• In a Broader sense, various theories and approaches

have been emerged over the years to study and analyze the process of language of acquisition. Four main schools of thought, which provide theoretical paradigms in guiding the course of language acquisition are:

• Imitation, Nativism or Behaviorism: based on empiricist or behavioral approach.

• Innateness or Mentalism: based on the rationalistic or mentalist approach

• Cognition: based on the cognitive-psychological approach

• Motherese or Input: based on the maternal approach to language acquisition.

Sources

• www.slideshare.net/.../behaviourism-and-mentalism-nasir-presentation

• onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1944-9720.1972.tb00709.../pdf

• Google Images

BehavioristSkinner and his followers are known as

behaviorist. According to them language learning is a process known as operant conditioning.

Conditioned Behavior - behavior in which the training is repeated.

Operant – voluntary behavior; it is the result of the learner’s own free will, and it is not forced by any person or thing from the outside. The learner demonstrates the new behavior first as a response to a system of reward or punishment, and finally as an automatic response.

B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)

“ Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.”

Experiment• They put a rat in a box containing a bar. If it presses the

bar, it is rewarded with a pallet of food. Nothing forces it to push the bar.

• It probably does accidentally at the first time. When the rat finds out that food will arrive, it will press the bar again.

• Task was made difficult; the rat only gets rewarded with food if it presses the bar while a light is flashed.

• At first the rat was puzzled but eventually learns the trick.

• To make it more difficult, the rat can only receive food if it presses the bar more than once.

• After initial confusion it learned to do so. And so on, and so on.

Skinner Box-

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STIMULUS RESPONSE REINFORCEMENT

REPETITION

-

• In Operant conditioning, reinforcement plays a

vital role.

• TWO kinds of Reinforcement:

1. Positive Reinforcement (Praise and rewards)

2. Negative Reinforcement (Rebuke and

punishments)

Behaviorism

• Language Learning is Operant Conditioning

• Positive and Negative Reinforcement

• Imitation and Association

.• Noam Chomsky explicitly rejects the

behaviorists’ position that language should be thought of as verbal behavior, arguing that it should be thought of as knowledge held by those who use language.

• Chomsky suggests that the learner of any language has an inbuilt learning capacity of language that enables each learner to construct a kind of personal theory or set of rules about the language based on very limited exposure to language.

Noam Chomsky (1928, 86yrs old)

“The general population doesn’t

know what’s happening, and it

doesn’t even know that it doesn’t

know.”

Mentalist

• Chomsky and his mentalist followers claim that a child learns his first language through cognitive learning. They claim that language is governed by rules, and is not a haphazard thing, as Skinner and his followers would claim.

• According to Chomsky, the child is born with a mental capacity for working out the underlying system to the jumble of sounds which he hears.

• He constructs his own grammar and imposes it on all the sound reaching his brain.

…

• The mental grammar is part of his cognitive framework, and nothing he hears is store in his brain until he has matched it against what he already knows and found a ‘correct’ place for it within this framework.

• Chomsky argues that language is so complex that it is almost incredible that it can be acquired by a child in a so short of time.

• He says that a child is born with some innate mental capacity which helps the child to process all the language which he hears.

• This is called the

Language Acquisition Device

He saw it as comprising a special area of the brain whose only function is the processing of language.

When Chomsky talks about ‘rules’, he means the unconscious rules in a child’s mind. These rules enables him to make grammatical sentences in his own language.

Chomsky does not mean that a child can do as described in these rules explicitly.

For example,

• A four or five year old child can produce a

sentence like “I’m done with my work”; he can

do that because he has a ‘mental grammar’

which enables him to form correct present

perfect structures and also to use such

structures in the right and appropriate

situations. But he is unable to define the

formation of present perfect tense.

Mentalism

• Language learning is innate ability

• Mental (own rules) and Grammatical sentences

Conclusion• Both theories states significant things, yet

neither is perfect.

• The mentalists’ emphasis on the rule-learning

is over enthusiastic, and the behaviorists’

rejection of meaning is entirely unjust.

• Language acquisition seems to be a process

both of analogy and application, both nature

and nurture.

.

Behaviorist Mentalist

1. Language acquisition is

stimulus-response process.

Language is an innate, in-born

process.

2. Language is a conditioned

behavior

Language is not a behavior

like other behaviors, but a

specific mental process.

3. Children learn language by

imitation and analogy.

Children learn language by

application.

4. Language learning is based

on practice.

Language learning is

analytical, generative and

creation.

5. The role of imitation,

repetition, reinforcement and

motivation is very significant

in language learning.

6. Language acquisition is the

result of nature

The role of exposure to

language is quite vital.

Language acquisition is the

result of nurture.

Conclusion

• This comparative study makes one thing clear: nature and nurture, analogy and application, practice and exposure, are important.

• Innate potentialities lay down the framework. Within this framework, there is a wide variation depending on the environment. The kind of language that children ultimately grown into shaped by the culture-based responses of the family, if not in a way that can be called imitation, then at least in terms of things the child chooses to do with its language.

…

• But we should be wary of the idea that all children experience the same practices and follow the same development path as they grow into their language.

• Having been exposed to a small number of utterances, the child begins to extract the principles underlying the utterances and compose new words of his own.

• This is the way every child grammar communicate in an intelligent manner.

• He make mistakes and produces ungrammatical sentences. His elders correct him; he feeds the information into his mini-grammar, modifies some of the rules, and again produces new utterances.

…

• In a period of about four years, he is able to

master and internalize all the essential rules of

language.

• This proves that a child’s own rules of

grammar are more important to him than mere

imitation.