Three theories of first language acquisition

Various theories have been put forward by psychologists and linguists to explain how children acquire language.

Behaviourism

The Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov first developed the idea of ‘conditioning’ to describe the psychological processes of learning. This idea was the foundation of behaviourism, which was the dominant school of thought in psychology between about 1920 and 1950. Behaviourists believe that all human behaviour is learned in an environment of stimulus, reward and punishment.

In 1957, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner published a book called ‘Verbal Behavior’ which made a direct connection between behaviourism and language learning. As far as the early stages of language acquisition are concerned, it is easy to see why there appeared to be some merit to this idea. As anyone who has spent time with young children knows, children often copy the language they hear around them. Adults often provide children with feedback on their language use, which may take the form of praise. Even if no praise is forthcoming, the fact that they have communicated successfully could be taken to be positive reinforcement in itself.

Innatism

In 1959 Noam Chomsky, an American linguist, published a review of B.F. Skinner’s ‘Verbal Behavior’ which challenged the behaviourist theory of language acquisition. His argument centred on the idea that children frequently produce examples of language that they have never heard before, which provides evidence that they are not simply learning through imitation. In addition to this, it is true that not all children imitate the language they hear to the same extent. Regardless of whether they do this or not, virtually all children manage to learn their first language successfully. Chomsky hypothesised that children are born with an innate ability to learn a language.

Analysis of the language produced by young children supports Chomsky’s theory. Pre-school children often say sentences which are not grammatically correct. It is highly unlikely that these sentences are produced as a result of imitation. This is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about, but as children are acquiring grammar rules, they go through various developmental stages. For example, they might have picked up that ‘-ed’ is added to the end of a verb to change it into the past simple. Then they overgeneralise this rule and produce grammatically incorrect sentences such as, ‘Yesterday I goed to school’ or ‘Cup breaked’.

Social Interactionist Theory

Interactionists believe that both biological and social factors play key roles in first language acquisition. Not only are children born with an innate ability to learn a language. The environment in which children grow up and opportunities they have for social interaction are also crucial in terms of their language development. One of the main proponents of Social Interactionist Theory was the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky.

The extent to which parents interact with their children varies significantly from culture to culture – and even from family to family. Nevertheless, nearly all children grow up in an environment where they are exposed to meaningful examples of language. And virtually all children succeed in learning their first language successfully. Opportunities to put this theory to the test have been few and far between. However, there is some evidence that babies and young children who do not have opportunities for social interaction experience delayed development in terms of their first language acquisition.