PSYC1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Language Acquisition Device, Language Development, Language Acquisition
19 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Language development
Nature or nurture
4 aspects of language
1. Phonology - sounds used by speakers of a language
2. Semantics - meaning of words and utterances
3. Grammar/syntax - form or structure of a language, rules for combining words into meaningful
sentences*
4. Pragmatics - principles specifying how language is used in conversation, how discourse is
structured
3 approaches
Empiricists/behaviourist
Skinner,
Bandura
Learning approach, nurture
Skinner - acquisition via positive reinforcement for saying
words and sentences
Bandura - social learning perspective - learning by imitation
and reinforcement
Nativists
Chomsky
, pinker
Innate language knowledge/learning guidelines, natures
Chomsky - humans are biologically programmed for language
learning, have a language acquisition device (LAD)
• Argued language too complex to be learned
Recursion - sentences can be embedded within sentences
• Cannot get this from Skinner or Piaget's learning
mechanisms
Interactionist/constructiv
ist
Bates
and
tomasell
o
Domain-general maturation and cognitive/social learning
account for language
Language emerges from other faculties
Language acquisition is a product between maturation and
environmental factors and is tied to cognitive development
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Skinner - acquisition via positive reinforcement for saying words and sentences. Bandura - social learning perspective - learning by imitation and reinforcement. Chomsky - humans are biologically programmed for language learning, have a language acquisition device (lad: argued language too complex to be learned. Recursion - sentences can be embedded within sentences: cannot get this from skinner or piaget"s learning mechanisms. Domain-general maturation and cognitive/social learning account for language. Language acquisition is a product between maturation and environmental factors and is tied to cognitive development. Words in language development: vocab explosion 2-6yo, gentner - natural partitions hypothesis, objects perceptually cohesive, relations among objects perceptually less defined, more varied ways to represent them, language becomes more critical for learning concepts of relations. In general: the more children exposed to language in a particular domain, the faster they tend to develop in that domain, e. g. more spatial words in input predicts increased spatial reasoning.
