Language Development: Theories

Behaviorism

A school of psychology that confines itself to the study of observable and quantifiable aspects of behavior and excludes subjective phenomena, such as emotions or motives.

When do you lose access to the Language acquisition device?

At puberty you lose access to what?

Authors of social-Interactionist

Bates, tomasello

Pros of generativism

Behaviorism couldn't explain how we generate novel, never before heard utterances. POV argument

The 3 theories of language development

Behaviorism, generativism, Cognitivism/usage based

Non-generativist cognitive approached differ from generativism

Beside they do not believe in Universal grammar. They believe that language is just one part of cognition. Focuses on explaining learning without the stipulation of an innate LAD or UG

Social-interactionist

Emphasizes the role of communication. The purpose of language

Noam Chomsky

Famous linguist who basically founded generativism and came up with universal gramma

Social- pragmatist

Focuses on what is the function of communication

Usage based/ constructionist authors

Goldberg, Fillmore, Lievan, tomasello

Usage-based/ constructionist

Grammar is learned from the input. Semantics and syntax are part of what's learned. No deep structures, only surface structures. How language is learned determines what is learned. Grammar emerges ( you learn it bit by bit). Emphasis is on input and how it shapes learning.

The black box

How behaviorists refer to cognitive processes/the mind.

Pros of behaviorism

It puts psychology ( and the study of language) in the realm of science. It gets away from introspection. It puts emphasis on measurement and experimentation.

Cons of generativism

Linguists have failed to find and document universal characteristics of language. Or any uniquely human characteristics. And it turns out you CAN learn language based on positive evidence alone. And there are also other aspects of language that help us learn it

Connectionist

Models language and language learning on the concept of a network of neural nodes. Networks of association. Learning creates connections between nodes and the nodes conspire to provide some function

Drawbacks of generativism

Redundancies in learning. There is also a tendency to call things innate principles of language learning rather than trying to explain in terms of other aspects of learning.

Authors of connectionist

Rummelhart, McClelland, Elman, Dell

Linking rules

Surface structures differ because of these

Language acquisition device

The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a hypothetical module of the human mind posited to account for children's innate predisposition for language acquisition. First proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language.

Skinner

The founder of behaviorism. He emphasized observable behavior in the study of humans.

Cons of behaviorism

They consider cognitive mechanisms to be irrelevant. They consider language to be just verbal behavior. Basically, the behavior is not the point, the point is what's going on in your mind.

Constructions grammar

Thought of as frames composed of slots into which words, morphemes, parts of speech, semantic relations etc can fit

Generativism is

Unfalsifiable. It can't be proven to be false

Deep structure

Universal grammatical structures/forms common to all languages

Generativists believe:

You don't learn language, you acquire it. Experience helps us select appropriate parameters. Variability of languages is only on the surface.

Generativism

a linguistic theory that attempts to describe the tacit knowledge that a native speaker has of a language by establishing a set of explicit, formalized rules that specify or generate all the possible grammatical sentences of a language, while excluding all unacceptable sentences.

Surface structure

a structural representation of the final syntactic form of a sentence, as it exists after the transformational component has modified a deep structure. Compare deep structure. the string of words that is actually produced.

Recursion

embedding of a structure (sentence) within another structure of the same type. The key word being within

Universal Grammar

is a linguistic theory, proposed by Noam Chomsky, that argues that the ability to learn language is innate, distinctly human and distinct from all other aspects of human cognition.

Poverty of the stimulus argument

the assertion that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity. Errors, lack of neg. evidence and all typical kids master their language