Language acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition , which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional languages in both children and adults.
The process of language acquisition is among the leading aspects that distinguishes humans from other organisms. While many forms of animal language exist, production is often fixed and does not vary much across cultural groups, though comprehension may be more flexible (primates may learn to pick up bird signals) The complexity and referential richness and social contextual variation of human language is not exhibited by any other species.
Early views on language acquisition
One of the complexities of acquiring language is that it is learned by infants from what appears to be very little input. This has led to the long-standing debate on the issue of whether a child is born with some idea of meanings, or whether these are learned based on social convention.
Plato felt that the word-meaning mapping in some form was innate. Sanskrit grammarians debated over twelve centuries whether meaning was god-given (possibly innate) or was learned from older convention - e.g. a child learning the word for cow by listening to trusted speakers talking about cows.
In modern times, empiricists like Hobbes and Locke argued that knowledge (and for Locke, language) emerge ultimately from abstracted sense impressions. This led to Carnap's Aufbau, an attempt to learn all knowledge from sense datum, using the notion of "remembered as similar" to bind these into clusters, which would eventually map to language.
Under Behaviorism, it was argued that language may be learned through a form of operant conditioning. In B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour (1957), he suggested that the successful use of a sign such as a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus, reinforces its "momentary" or contextual probability.
Generative tradition and a return to nativism
This behaviourist idea was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky in a review article in 1959, calling it "largely mythology" and a "serious delusion". Instead, Chomsky argued for a more theoretical approach, based on a study of syntax. Chomsky's generative grammar ignored semantics and language use, focusing on the set of rules that would generate syntactically correct strings. This led to a model of acquisition which attempted to discover grammar from examples of well-formed sentences, ignoring semantics or context.
However, it turns out that infinitely many rule-sets or grammars can explain the data, so discovering one was very difficult. Indeed, trained linguists working for decades have not been able to identify a grammar for any human language. Also, the input available to the child learner was deemed insufficient (the poverty of stimulus argument). These aspects led Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Eric Lenneberg and others to suggest that some form of grammar must be innate (the nativist position).
What is innate was claimed to be a universal grammar, initially connected to an organ called the language acquisition device (LAD). Subsequently, the word organ was replaced by the phrase "language faculty" and Chomsky suggested that what was universal across all languages were a set of principles, that were modified for each particular language by a set of parameters.
Nativists view that there are some "hidden assumptions" or biases that allow children to quickly figure out what is and isn't possible in the grammar of their native language, and allow them to master that grammar by the age of three.
Empiricist views (opposing nativism)
Since Chomsky's heyday in the 1950's, many criticisms of the basic assumptions of generative theory have been put forth. Critics argue that the concept of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is unsupported by evolutionary anthropology, which tends to show a gradual adaptation of the human brain and vocal chords to the use of language, rather than a sudden appearance of a complete set of binary parameters delineating the whole spectrum of possible grammars ever to have existed and ever to exist. (Binary parameters are common to digital computers but not, as it turns out, to neurological systems such as the human brain.)
Further, while generative theory has several hypothetical constructs (such as movement, empty categories, complex underlying structures, and strict binary branching) that cannot possibly be acquired from any amount of linguistic input, it is unclear that human language is actually anything like the generative conception of it. Since language, as imagined by nativists, is unlearnably complex, subscribers to this theory argue that it must therefore be innate. A different theory of language, however, may yield different conclusions. While all theories of language acquisition posit some degree of innateness, a less convoluted theory might involve less innate structure and more learning. Under such a theory of grammar, the input, combined with both general and language-specific learning capacities, might be sufficient for acquisition.
Since 1980, linguists studying children, such as Melissa Bowerman, and psychologists following Piaget, like Elizabeth Bates and Jean Mandler, came to suspect that there may indeed be many learning processes involved in the acquisition process, and that ignoring the role of learning may have been a mistake.
In recent years, opposition to the nativist position has multiplied. The debate has centered on whether the inborn capabilities are language-specific or domain-general, such as those that enable the infant to visually make sense of the world in terms of objects and actions. The anti-nativist view has many strands, but a frequent theme is that language emerges from usage in social contexts, using learning mechanisms that are a part of a general cognitive learning apparatus (which is what is innate). This position has been championed by Elizabeth Bates, Catherine Snow, Brian MacWhinney, Michael Tomasello, Michael Ramscar,William O'Grady, and others. Philosophers, such as Fiona Cowie and Barbara Scholz with Geoffrey Pullum have also argued against certain nativist claims in support of empiricism.
Empiricist theories
Empiricist theories of language acquisition include statistical learning theories of language acquisition, Relational Frame Theory, functionalist linguistics, Social interactionist theory, usage-based language acquisition, and others.
Statistical learning theories of language acquisition
Some language acquisition researchers, such as Elissa Newport, Richard Aslin, and Jenny Saffran, believe that language acquisition is based primarily on general learning mechanisms, namely statistical learning. The development of connectionist models that are able to successfully learn words and syntactical conventions supports the predictions of statistical learning theories of language acquisition, as do empirical studies of children's learning of words and syntax.
Chunking theories of language acquisition
Chunking theories of language acquisition constitute a group of theories related to statistical learning theories in that they assume that the input from the environment plays an essential role; however, they postulate different learning mechanisms. The central idea of these theories is that language development occurs through the incremental acquisition of meaningful“chunks” (chunks) of elementary constituents, which can be words, phonemes, or syllables. Recently, this approach has been highly successful in simulating several phenomena in the acquisition of syntactic categories and the acquisition of phonological knowledge . The approach has several features that make it unique: the models are implemented as computer programs, which enables clear-cut and quantitative predictions to be made; they learn from naturalistic input, made of actual child-directed utterances; they produce actual utterances, which can be compared with children’s utterances; and they have simulated phenomena in several languages, including English, Spanish, and German.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have developed a computer model analyzing early toddler conversations to predict the structure of later conversations. They showed that toddlers develop their own individual rules for speaking with slots into which they could put certain kinds of words. A significant outcome of the research was that rules inferred from toddler speech were better predictors of subsequent speech than traditional grammars.
Social interactionist theory
Main article: Social interactionist theorySocial interactionist theory consists of a number of proven hypotheses on language acquisition. These hypotheses deal with written, spoken, or visual social tools which consist of complex systems of symbols and rules on language acquisition and development. The compromise between “nature” and “nurture” is the “interactionist” approach: it demands a particular type of syntagma in recognizing that many factors influence language development.
Relational frame theory
The relational frame theory (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, Roche, 2001), provides a wholly selectionist/learning account of the origin and development of language competence and complexity. Based upon the principles of Skinnerian behaviorism, RFT posits that chi
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