LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: THEORIES
A number of theoretical positions can be identified:
Language is a set of habits, with associations formed between words and the real-world states/objects which they refer to. See behaviourism.
Language is acquired through extended exposure to adult speech and a desire to make sense of the environment. See empiricism.
There is an innate language faculty, which is (a) fully developed at birth; or (b) programmed into the maturation process. See nativism.
A general cognitive predisposition equips infants to trace patterns in the miscellaneous language which they encounter. See cognitivism.
The cognitive limitations of the infant equip it for cracking the language code. See ‘less is more’.
Language is acquired through the infant’s desire to interact with its carers. See social-interactionism.
The original behaviourist view is much out of favour, but the recent emergence of connectionism has raised again the possibility that language is acquired by a process of association and without the need of cognitive pattern-recognition skills.
