Language Acquisition - History

History

Philosophers in ancient societies were interested in how humans acquired the ability to understand and produce language well before empirical methods for testing those theories were developed, but for the most part they seemed to regard language acquisition as a subset of man's ability to acquire knowledge and learn concepts. Some early, observation based ideas about language acquisition were proposed by Plato, who felt that word-meaning mapping in some form was innate. Additionally, Sanskrit grammarians debated for over twelve centuries whether humans' ability to recognize the meaning of words was god-given (possibly innate) or passed down by previous generations and learned from already established conventions—e.g. a child learning the word for cow by listening to trusted speakers talking about cows.

In a more modern context, empiricists, like Hobbes and Locke, argued that knowledge (and, for Locke, language) emerge ultimately from abstracted sense impressions. These arguments lean towards the "nurture" side of the argument- that language is acquired through sensory experience. This led to Carnap's Aufbau, an attempt to learn all knowledge from sense datum, using the notion of "remembered as similar" to bind these into clusters, which would eventually map into language.

Proponents of Behaviorism argued that language may be learned through a form of operant conditioning. In B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour (1957), he suggested that the successful use of a sign, such as a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus, reinforces its "momentary" or contextual probability. Since operant conditioning is contingent on reinforcement by rewards, a child would learn that a specific combination of sounds stands for a specific thing through repeated successful associations made between the two. A "successful" use of a sign would be one in which the child is understood (for example, a child saying "up" when he or she wants to be picked up) and rewarded with the desired response from another person, thereby reinforcing the child's understanding of the meaning of that word and making it more likely that he or she will use that word in a similar situation in the future. Some Empiricist theories of language acquisition include the statistical learning theory Charles F. Hockett of language acquisition, Relational Frame Theory, functionalist linguistics, social interactionist theory, and usage-based language acquisition.

Skinner's behaviourist idea was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky in a review article in 1959, calling it "largely mythology" and a "serious delusion". Instead, Chomsky argued for a mathematical approach to language acquisition, based on a study of syntax.