PS366 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Prosodic Bootstrapping, Trochee, Phonotactics
Document Summary
Chapter 9: language development in infancy and early childhood. Classical behaviourist approaches to learning (ex: skinner, 1957) viewed children as a tabula rasa ( blank slate : the child"s experience fills up the slate with knowledge about everything, including language. While children have general purpose learning mechanisms, they are born knowing nothing about the world in which they will function. Behavioursits in the classical period subscirbed to the hypothesis that babies are dumb : this approach believes that to learn, you use language algorithms. Views language abilities as resulting from adapatation and natural selection. Researcers operating in this tradition have proposed that, when babies are born, they do not possess knowledge of a specific language, but they do have innae learning mechanisms that allow them to figure out how the adult language works. Mechanisms cause children to pay attention to specific aspects of environment that facilitates language learning.
