THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION CONSTRUCTION OF A GRAMMAR THEORY, CONNECTIONIST THEORIES, SOCIAL INTERACTION THEORY

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use sentences to communicate. Language acquisition involves structures, rules and representation. The capacity to successfully use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary. Language can be vocalized as in speech or manual as in sign. Human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite number of sentences, which is based on a syntactic principle called recursion. Evidence suggests that every individual has three recursive mechanisms that allow sentences to go indeterminately. These three mechanisms are called: gelatinization, complementation, and coordination.

There are several main theories on language acquisition. These theories provide the framework for how children are taught language and provide a hypothesis for why and how children learn. A group of Theorist believes that language is a learned behavior and language is no different from any other king of human learning while others feel that not much is required, language is instinctive. Given several theories, the authors did a compare and contrast of The Active Construction of Grammar, Connection Theory and the Social Interaction Theory.

B. Research Questions

1. What does The Active Construction of Grammar mean?

2. What does The Connection Theory mean?

3. What does The Social Interaction Theory mean?

C. Purposes

1. To find out what The Active Construction of Grammar is

2. To find out what The Connection Theory is

3. To find out what The Social Interaction Theory is

 CHAPTER II 

DISCUSSION

A. Active Construction of a Grammar Theory

Children's language errors are considered developmental forms not errors. Although they are different, children are learning and progressing as they grow, this is the same with language. Children listen to the speech around them and make the rules of the language by finding patterns, thinking about the rules behind the pattern, and test the rules. Although initially their language may share characteristics with adult grammar, there will be significant differences. Children will use the language they have discovered and by trial and error slowly modify the rules until the rules match those of adult speech.

The Active Construction of a Grammar Theory, the most influential theory of language acquisition, holds that children actually invent the rules of grammar themselves. The theory assumes that the ability to develop rules is innate, but that the actual rules are based on the speech children hear around them; this is their input or data for analysis. Children listen to the language around them and analyze it to determine the patterns that exist. When they think they have discovered a pattern, they hypothesize a rule to account for it. They add this rule to their growing grammar and use it in constructing utterances. For example, a child’s early hypothesis about how to form the past tense of verbs will be to add an allomorph of -ed. All past tense verbs would then be constructed with this rule, producing forms such as holed and elated alongside needed and walked. Notice that at this point the child would have already learned the rules of when the regular past tense ending is pronounced [d], [t], or [əd]. When children discover that there are forms in the language that do not match those produced by this rule, they modify the rule or add another one to produce the additional forms. Eventually, the child has created and edited his or her own grammar to the point where it matches an adult’s grammar. At this point, there are no significant discrepancies between the forms produced by the child and those produced by the adults. Clearly, the child has a complete working grammar all along, even before it is essentially adult like. The child uses this  grammar to produce utterances; when those utterances differ from adult speech, they are reflecting the differences in the two grammars.

Within this framework, children’s mistakes are expected to occur and to follow non- random patterns. This is because the child is forming utterances according to grammatical rules even though the rules are often different from those that adults use. It is important to note also that active reinforcement by adults about a child’s mistakes is not enough to help the child “discover” what is wrong with his or her own utterances; the child must make the connection in his or her own time.

B. Connectionist Theories

Connectionist theories of language acquisition assume that children learn language by creating neural connections in the brain. A child develops such connections through exposure to language and by using language. Through these connections, the child learns associations between words, meanings, sound sequences, and so on. For example, a child may hear the word bottle in different circumstances and establish neural connections every time the word is heard. Such connections can be to the word itself, to the initial sound /b/, to the word milk, to what the bottle looks like, to the activity of drinking, and so on. Eventually, all of these connections become the child’s mental representation of the meaning and the form of the word. Connections can have different strengths, and language acquisition involves adjusting the strengths of the connections appropriately. The strength of a connection is dependent on input frequency. For example, if a child hears the word bottle more frequently in connection with milk than with water, then the connection between bottle and milk will be stronger than that between bottle and water. Thus, instead of developing abstract rules, according to connectionist theories, children exploit statistical information from linguistic input. Such theories assume that the input children receive is indeed rich enough to learn language without an innate mechanism to invent linguistic rules.

To get a better feel for how this theory works and how it differs from other theories, let’s look at the acquisition of the past tense of verbs again. The Active Construction of a Grammar Theory assumes that children produce words like ‘goed’ or ‘growed’ because they have formed a rule that tells them to add -ed to a verb to form the past tense. Connectionist models assume that the child merely exploits statistical information about forming past tenses. Thus, the child says ‘goed’ and ‘growed’ because the existence of forms like showed, mowed, towed, and glowed makes this pattern statistically likely.

Evidence for the exploitation of statistics as opposed to the development of abstract rules comes from experiments in which, for example, children create the past tense of nonsense verbs. For instance, when asked to complete the phrase “This man is fringing; Yesterday, he _____,” many children create nonsense irregular forms such as ‘frang’ or ‘frought’ instead of the nonsense regular form fringed. Such data pose a problem for the Active Construction of a Grammar Theory, but the data can be explained in terms of a connectionist model. If children invent rules and then learn exceptions to the rules, they should produce fringed as the past tense of ‘fringe’ because it is not one of the learned exceptions. However, if children exploit statistical data, they would be expected to sometimes produce irregular forms because of their exposure to words like sing, ring, or bring.

Of course, it is possible that children both develop rules and also make use of statistical data. That is, it is possible that acquisition of grammatical rules proceeds according to a hybrid model and those children actively construct a grammar by establishing and exploiting neural connections.

C. Social Interaction Theory

Social Interaction Theory assumes that children acquire language through social interaction, with older children and adults in particular. This approach holds that children prompt their parents to supply them with the appropriate language experience they need. Thus, children and their language environment are seen as a dynamic system: children need their language environment to improve their social and linguistic communication skills, and the appropriate language environment exists because it is cued by the child. Like those who advocate the Active Construction of Grammar Theory, social interactionists believe that children must develop rules and that they have a predisposition to learn language. However, social interaction theorists place a great deal of emphasis on social inter action and the kind of input that children receive, instead of assuming that simply being exposed to language use will suffice. According to this approach, the ways in which older children and adults talk to infants play a crucial role in how a child acquires language. In many Western societies, speech to infants (child-directed speech) is slow and high-pitched and contains many repetitions, simplified syntax, exaggerated intonation, and a simple and concrete vocabulary. Consider the following examples from Berko Gleason and Bernstein Ratner (1998: 385):

 (1) See the birdie? Look at the birdie! What a pretty birdie!

(2) Has it come to your attention that one of our better-looking feathered friends

is perched upon the windowsill?

When pointing out a bird on the windowsill to an infant, adults and older children are likely to say something like (1) in a slow, high-pitched voice with exaggerated intonation. In addition, they are likely to point at the bird. The social aspect of the interaction involves sharing an observation with the child. All of this helps the child to decode what the speech might mean. No adult would normally point out a bird to an infant by uttering some- thing like (2). Social interactionists believe that the way adults speak to children and interact with children is crucial to acquiring language.

Of course, one of the problems with this theory is that children eventually do acquire the ability to utter and understand sentences like those in (1). While child- directed speech may be crucial early on, it is unclear how long a child must be exposed to it. Furthermore, the characteristics of child-directed speech vary from culture to culture, and we do not at this point know what specific aspects of such speech might, in fact, be crucial.

At the same time, this theory is also not completely incompatible with either of the two previous theories. That is, the types of social interactions that infants have may, in fact, be invaluable to language acquisition, which may develop through neural connections and involve the hypothesizing of particular grammatical rules on the part of the child.

REFERENCES

Dawson, H. and Phelan, M., 2016. Language files: Materials for an introduction to language and linguistics. The Ohio State University Press.

Christie Berkey, “The active construction of a Grammar theory”, accessed on https://prezi.com/8p2ebdouqoas/the-active-construction-of-a-grammar-theory/, date 28 March 2020 at 13.17.