EMPIRICISM
A view that all knowledge is acquired through experience. In a language-acquisition context, a view that an infant acquires language chiefly through exposure to the speech of those about it.
The origin of knowledge has been a recurrent topic in philosophy. Plato enunciated a view (Plato’s problem) that a child could not possibly, in the short time available to it, acquire the range of knowledge that an adult commands. The issue was the cause of much debate in the eighteenth century. Continental philosophers such as Descartes and Kant adopted a nativist view that some knowledge must be present at birth; whereas British philosophers, such as Locke, Hume and Mill, took the empiricist or rationalist view that knowledge is acquired through the action of the mind upon the environment.
Empiricist approaches to language acquisition maintain that the speech to which the child is exposed (child directed speech plus ambient adult speech) provides linguistic information of sufficient quality and quantity to support acquisition. An assumption of this kind underlies:
behaviourism: a view of language as a set of habits acquired when the child imitates the carer and is rewarded;
connectionism: a view that the infant receives sufficient evidence to support a learning process in which connections are established between certain words and certain concepts and are strengthened by further exposure;
social-interactionism: the view that language is the outcome of the child’s need to relate socially to those about it and/or the child’s need to achieve certain pragmatic functions.
See also: Behaviourism, Connectionism, Functionalism, Social interactionism
