Language Development - Theoretical Frameworks of Language Development

Theoretical Frameworks of Language Development

Language development is thought to proceed by ordinary processes of learning in which children acquire the forms, meanings and uses of words and utterances from the linguistic input. The method in which we develop language skills is universal however, the major debate is how the rules of syntax are acquired. There are two major approaches to syntactic development, an empiricist account by which children learn all syntactic rules from the linguistic input, and a nativist approach by which some principles of syntax are innate and are transmitted through the human genome.

The nativist theory, proposed by Noam Chomsky, argues that language is a unique human accomplishment. Chomsky says that all children have what is called an LAD, an innate language acquisition device that allows children to produce consistent sentences once vocabulary is learned. His claim is based upon the view that what children hear - their linguistic input - is insufficient to explain how they come to learn language. While this view has dominated linguistic theory for over fifty years and remains highly influential, as witnessed by the number of articles in journals, and books.

The empiricist theory suggests, contra Chomsky, that there is enough information in the linguistic input that children receive, and therefore there is no need to assume an innate language acquisition device (see above). Some researchers in this tradition employ a methodology involving the construction of computational models that learn aspects of language and/or that simulate the type of linguistic output produced by children, such as the statistical learning theories suggested by Saffran, such as connectionist models and chunking theories.

Other researchers embrace an interactionist perspective, consisting of social-interactionist theories of language development. In such approaches, children learn language in the interactive and communicative context, learning language forms for meaningful moves of communication. These theories focus mainly on the caregiver's attitudes and attentiveness to their children in order to promote productive language habits.

An older empiricist theory, the behaviorist theory proposed by B. F. Skinner suggested that language is learned through operant conditioning, namely, by imitation of stimuli and by reinforcement of correct responses . This perspective has not been widely accepted at any time, but by some accounts, is experiencing a resurgence. Some empiricist theory accounts today use behaviorist models.

Other relevant theories about language development include Piaget's theory of cognitive development, which considers the development of language as a continuation of general cognitive development and Vygotsky's social theories that attribute the development of language to an individual's social interactions and growth.