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