THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

WHAT IS A THEORY
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary a theory is
1-A set of properly argued ideas intended to explain facts and events.
2-Ideas, beliefs or claims about something which may or may not be found true in
practice.
According to the definition of Longmans Dictionary Of Contemporary English, a theory
is
1-An idea or a set of ideas that is intended to explain something about life or the world
especially that has not yet been proved to be true.
2-An idea that someone thinks is true but for which they have no proof.
WHAT IS LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
1-Acquisition is a process whereby children become speakers of their native language.
2-Acquisition is a process by which language capabilities of a person increases.
APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Various theories and approaches have been emerged over the years to study and analyze
the process of language acquisition. According to the arguments presented by Allan
Paivio Len Begg {Psychology of Language, p-222}, there exists three main school of
ideas regarding language acquisition
1-Behavioural approaches to language acquisition
2-Linguistic approaches to language acquisition
3-Cognitive approaches to language acquisition

LINGUISTICS AND PSYCHOLOGY

Until non for most linguists the main aim of their discipline was providing structural
analysis of a body of language data. And to be truly scientific in their approach they dealt
with the substance of language in isolation from any sociological or psychological factors
that might effect its use .Although they had been interested in the processes involved in
using language but they believed it to be the function of the psychologists and not the
linguists to investigate. They tended to adopt fairly uncritically whatever the
psychologists proposed
But in recent years many linguists have retained this point of view that the true task of a
linguist should be not the description of individual languages but
1- the explanation of language use.
2- This in turn demands research into human capacity for language
3- And this involves the incorporation of psychology into linguistics.
So todays linguists say
1-Linguistics is a branch of psychology or
2-Psychology is a branch of linguistics since language is central to all human
activities.
The main areas of psycholinguistics is language acquisition
1-How do children acquire their mother tongue
2-The way people learn foreign language
3-The relationship between words and thoughts

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

According to Wilkins}Linguistics in Language Teaching] there exists two highly
contrasting general accounts of language acquisition
1-Behaviourism

2-Mentalism

BEHAVIORISM
IS BEHAVIOUR WHAT
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary behavior is
1-One,s attitude or manner
2-Some act or function in a particular situation
WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE
According to Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary Behavioral Science is
The study of human behavior
Since linguistics is also included in behavioral sciences, it purpose as well is the study of
language with respect to human behavior
WHAT IS BEHAVIORISM
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary, Behaviorism is
1-the theory that all human behavior is learnt to fit in with external conditions and is not
influenced by peoples thoughts and feelings.
According to the definition of Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Behaviorism is
2-The belief the scientific study of the mind should be based only on peoples behavior,
not on what they say about their thoughts and feelings.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO BEHAVIORISM
In 1913, in one of the most famous lectures in the history of psychology, John Broadus
Watson (1878-1958), a 35-year-old "animal behavior man" from Johns Hopkins
University, called for a radical revision of the scope and method of psychological
research.:

"Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of

natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection
forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent
upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of
consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response,
recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its
refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of
investigation."
Introspection was to be abandoned in favor of the study of behavior. Behavior was to be
evaluated in its own right, independent of its relationship to any consciousness that might
exist. The concept of "consciousness" was to be rejected as an interpretive standard and
eschewed as an explanatory device. As an objective, natural science, psychology was to
make no sharp distinction between human and animal behavior; and its goal was to
develop principles by which behavior could be predicted and controlled.
Published in the Psychological Review shortly after its delivery and incorporated within
the first chapter of Watson's 1914 Behavior: A Textbook of Comparative Psychology, this
lecture eventually came to be known as the "behaviorist manifesto." Generations of
psychologists, reared in a post-Watsonian discipline that defined itself as the "science of
behavior," were taught that Watson was the father of behaviorism and that February 24,
1913 was the day on which modern behaviorism was born.
Yet behaviorism did eventually spread throughout American psychology. During the
1920s, across the work of a growing number of psychologists, there emerged a
reasonably coherent set of intellectual commitments to which the name "behaviorism"
gradually became attached. Based on the rejection of mentalism in psychological theory,
a dedication to the use of objective methodology in research, and a strong concern with
practical application of psychological knowledge to the prediction and control of
behavior, "behaviorism" in the 1920s owed an obvious debt to Watson.

A RICHER VERSION OF BEHAVIORISM

At the same time, however, behaviorism grew during this period in part by diverging
from and transcending Watson. Influenced by broader conceptions of objectivism and of
psychological process developing at Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Missouri, Ohio State,
Minnesota, North Carolina, and even Hopkins, behaviorism had become, by the end of
the 1920s, a more thoroughly elaborated, theoretically more varied and sophisticated
approach than anything to be found in Watson's own writings. It was this richer version of
behaviorism, rather than Watsonianism , that succeeded in transforming American
psychology; and it did so not by converting the old guard but by capturing the enthusiasm
of the young. As succeeding generations of psychologists entered the discipline,
objectivism gradually became the norm; and by the mid-1930s, American psychology had
become the science of behavior, and behaviorism, methodological and/or theoretical, had
become its dominant orientation.

DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO BEHAVIORISM

Even among those who identified themselves as "behaviorists," agreement on the
program was by no means unanimous. Early behaviorism took a variety of forms]. There
was--1- the radical behaviorism of Watson, a view notable for its extreme anti-mentalism,
its radical reduction of thinking to implicit response, and, especially after 1916, its
heavy and somewhat simplistic theoretical reliance on conditioned reactions.
2- There was the relational behaviorism of the Harvard group, developed by Edwin
Bissell Holt (1873-1946). Conceiving of behavior as "a course of action which
the living body executes or is prepared to execute with regard to some object or
fact of its environment," Holt's behaviorism was molar, purposive and focused on
the relationship between high-level behavioral mechanisms in the organism and
the concrete realities of the social and physical environment.
3-

Closely related to this view was a kind of philosophical behaviorism, espoused

primarily by philosophers and tied to pragmatism, in which "consciousness" was
defined as a form of behavior guided by future results.]

4- Albert Paul Weiss (1879-1931) was developing a bio-social behaviorism based on

a radical distinction between the level of theoretical discourse appropriate to behavior
analyzed as social cause (i.e., "biosocially") and that appropriate to behavior analyzed as
sensorimotor effect (i.e., "biophysically").
5-At Minnesota, Karl Spencer Lashley (1890-1958) was arguing a physiological
behaviorism in which the physiological analysis of behavior could be considered "a
complete and adequate account of all the phenomena of consciousness."
6- At the University of Chicago, George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), who had been on
the faculty since Watson was a graduate student, was elaborating a social behaviorism of
mind, meaning, self, language, and thinking that emphasized the social character of
behavior and the behavioral character of mind.
7- Finally, in a number of institutions, a sort of eclectic behaviorism was emerging-a
behaviorism that assimilated whatever seemed strongest and most reliable in the views of
others.
PSYCHOLOGY FOR BEHAVIORISTS
As a natural science, psychology takes the study of behavior as its fundamental task.
Whatever else psychology might be, for early behaviorism it was fundamentally the
science of behavior, where behavior was defined in terms of the organism's organized
response to stimulation. Depending on the theorist and the reaction system in question,
response might be overt or covert, implicit or explicit, clear and well-defined or vague
and obscure, molecular or molar, simple or complex. Response might consist of an actual
act or simply of the adoption of an attitude, tendency, or set; it might be controlled by the
proximal stimulus or directed toward objects in the environment. But however otherwise
conceived, for the behaviorist, response involved the operation of effector systemsmuscles and glands. Behavior had to do with "how, when, and why a man does this or
that, acts thus and so, desires, seeks, accepts, rejects-in a word, moves."

ADJUSTMEMT AND MALADJUSTMENT

. In the 1920s, behaviorists were united in the assumption that behavior results when the
organism's relationship to the environment must be changed if it is to survive and prosper.
Behaviorism referred to such states as "maladjustments". Maladjustment is a natural
byproduct of change in the organism (e.g., an increase in drive level) or in the
environment (e.g., a rise in ambient air temperature); and behavior, which is a process of
adjustment, consists of responses on the part of the organism that tend to restore balance
in its relationship to the environment.

POLYGENETIC CONTINUITY
. For early behaviorism, animal and human behavior exist in an "unbroken continuity,"
Animals and humans share both mechanisms and fundamental forms of overt adjustment
to the environment. This view, which originated with Watson's desire to place the study of
animal behavior high on the psychological research agenda, was reinforced by
psychology's early success in extending trial-and-error and conditioning analyses from
animals to humans. As Dashiell summarized the continuity commitment: "The genus and
species Homo sapiens is moved by the same forces without and within as are the lower
animal forms, and expresses them in the same general types of actions and actiontendencies. The differences are differences in degree..."

THE DETERMINATION OF BEHAVIOR/

STIMULUS RESPONSE PSYCHOLOGY.
Behavior, from a behaviorist point of view, is a joint function of stimulating conditions
in the environment and characteristics (drive states, hereditary reflexes, acquired systems
of habit, emotions, mechanisms of implicit stimulation) within the organism. In its
earliest formulations, this commitment, from which behaviorism later became known as
"stimulus-response" or "S-R" psychology, was somewhat too simply phrased. Thus, for
example, in 1919, Watson said only that: "In each adjustment there is always both a
response or-act and a stimulus or situation which call] out that response....the stimulus is
always provided by the environment, external to the body, or by the movements of man's
own muscles and the secretions of his glands...[and] responses always follow relatively
immediately upon the presentation or incidence of the stimulus."

THE CLASSIFICATION OF BEHAVIOR

. Although many behaviorists pointed to the indissociability of response types in actual
behavior, early behaviorism remained wedded to the classification of response in terms of
three major categories: a) somatic/hereditary (pre-potent reflexes, instinctive reaction
tendencies); b) somatic/acquired (systems of habits); or c) visceral/hereditary and
acquired (emotions). Responses in all three categories were then further classified as
explicit, implicit, or preparatory (attitudinal).
Distinctions between instinctive, habitual, and emotional reaction systems were
delineated by Watson in 1919. "Human action as a whole," he wrote. "can be divided into
hereditary...(emotional and instinctive), and acquired modes of response (habit)."For
Watson, all three response modes were "pattern reactions," complex systems of reflexes
that function in an organized fashion when the organism is confronted with an
appropriate stimulus.

BEHAVIORAL REDEFINITION OF THE TRADITIONAL CATEGORIES OF

MENTALISM
. At the heart of early behaviorism lay a commitment to the notion that mentalistic
categories and concepts (e.g., perception, attention, meaning, symbol, memory, purpose,
abstraction, generalization, thought) must either be redefined in terms of behavioral
mechanisms or discarded altogether. In 1913, Watson excluded mind in its entirety from
behaviorism. Not only was consciousness rejected as both fact and concept, but
associated mental terms were to be discarded as well. This was the most extreme version
of this commitment; and other early behaviorists did not, as a rule, follow Watson down
this path. By far the most common approach was to redefine the standard concepts of
mental analysis in strictly behavioral terms. A few examples will suffice.
"Perceiving," for Dashiell, was an "anticipatory set (largely implicit) that orients...[the
organism] for a certain line of conduct with reference to...[the] situation." "Meaning" was
"the pattern of reaction-tendencies awakened by...[the thing perceived.]" For Allport, a
"symbol" was "a brief and labile response usually undetected in outward behavior, but
capable of being substituted for overt responses." "Consciousness," in Weiss's terms, was
"only the functioning of obscure contractile elements, which in turn stimulate adjacent
receptors that release the verbal overt response..." And "thinking," in that famous analysis
of Watson, simply meant "subvocal talking, general body language habits, bodily sets or
attitudes which are not easily observable without instrumentation or experimental aid."

ANIMAL MODELS
. Behaviorism emphasized the identification of fundamental mechanisms in animal
behavior (e.g., trial and error learning, conditioning) and use of such mechanisms,
without significant theoretical revision, in the explanation of human behavior. This
approach, which followed directly from the commitment to phylogenetic continuity, was
largely unquestioned among early behaviorists. Indeed, as behavioral research began to
develop in the late 1920's and 1930's, many of the most important studies focused on
animals and many core theoretical concepts came to be defined almost entirely in terms
of the procedures of animal behavior research.
HABIT FORMATION
. An emphasis on habit formation defined in terms of mechanisms of trial-and-error
elaboration of response and conditioned stimulus substitution was probably the
characteristic with which early behaviorism was most closely associated. Behaviorism in
the 1920's was first, last, and always a psychology of habit formation. Acquired behavior,
no matter how complex-thinking, talking, even scientific activity itself-could, in the final
analysis, be reduced to habit.
TRIAL AND ERROR MECHANISM
The trial-and-error mechanism (increase in random movement upon confrontation with a
problem situation, accidental success when chance response alters the organism or the
environment in the direction of greater adjustment, and gradual, mechanical selection and
reinforcement of successful movement) was usually employed to explain efferent
modification, the elaboration of the response itself. The conditioned reaction was
typically evoked to explain afferent modification-change in the effectiveness of stimuli,
including those that are purely social and symbolic, in eliciting a given response.
LANGUAGE
. For behaviorists in the 1920's, self-stimulation and response was intimately linked to
language. For both the self in thinking and the social listener in communication, language
responses were conceived as substitute, symbolic stimuli, independent of the sensory
attributes of the original stimulus. In this role, they subserved the related functions of
abstraction and generalization. As Weiss , who pioneered this analysis, asserted:

"...many different receptor patterns representative of many different sensory situations

and relations, are connected to the same language response and through this common
path the individual may react in a specific manner to all the objects, situations, and
relations thus concerned, even though there is very little sensory similarity between
them."
CONCLUSION
Psychology defined as the natural science of behavior, wedded to objectivism in method
and theory and to a goal of behavioral prediction and control; behavior, animal or human,
conceived as a pattern of adjustment (innate and acquired, skeletal and visceral, explicit
and implicit) functionally dependent upon stimulus conditions in the environment and
factors of habit and drive in the organism; emphasis in research and theory on animal
behavior, ontogenesis, drive reduction, habit formation, social behavior, and languagethis was the orientation that began, following World War I, to capture the imagination of
young psychologists and to spread within American psychology throughout the 1920's.
This was behaviorism in its early form.
SOME COMMON APPROACHES TO BEHAVIORISM
Conditioned reflexes---------------------------Ivan Pavlov
Experimental method------------------------John B. .Watson
Operant conditioning-----------------------B.F.Skinner
CONDITIONED REFLEXES/CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Pavlov a Russian Scientist made the discovery that led to the real beginning of
behaviorism. Pavlov and most of his contemporaries saw classical conditioning as
learning that comes from exposing an organism to association of environment events.
THE PAVLOVIAN EXPERIMENT
While studying digestive reflexes in dogs, Pavlov found out that it could reliably be
predicted that the dogs would salivate when food was placed in the mouth through a
reflex called the salivary reflex in digestion. Yet he soon realized that after some time
salivary reflex occurs even before the food was offered. Because of the sound of the door
and the sight of the attendant carrying the food. The dogs had transferred the reflex to
these repeated actions.

Thus the dogs learnt a new behavior. It was maintained by the behaviorists that language
as well is a sort of behavior that can be acquired in ideal social conditions. According to
them language is essentially the product of the society.

OPERANT CONDITIONING
Behaviorist theory takes language acquisition as a process of habit-formation through
stimuli-response model, as represented in Skinners Verbal Behavior (1957):
1) The child imitates the sounds and patterns which he hears from around him.
2) People recognize the childs attempts as being similar to the adult models
and reinforce (reward) the sounds, by approval or some other desirable
reaction.
3) In order to obtain more of these rewards, the child repeats the sounds and
patterns, so that these become habits.
4) In this way the childs verbal behavior is conditioned (or shaped) until the
habits coincide with the adult models.
Thus children learn language in the following steps
IMITATION
REPETITION
MEMORIZATION
CONTROLLED DRILLING
REINFORCEMENT
1-IMITATION AND REINFORCEMENT
Children just imitate what they hear. Parents teach them by telling them when
they make mistakes.Children start out as clean slates and through the process of
imitation they get linguistic habits printed on these slates. So we can say that
language acquisition is a process of experience.
2-CONDITIONED RESPONSE/STIMULUS RESPONSE PROCESS
The operant conditioning proposed by skinner is based upon four elements

Stimulus------Response---------Reinforcement----------Repetition

The hunger or loneliness ----------------------------------------------Stimulus

The baby cries-----------------------------------------------------------Response
The mother comforts him----------------------------------------------Reinforcement
The same process happens again--------------------------------------Repetition
The baby cries whenever hungry---------------------------------------New behavior
CHOMSKYS EXPERIMENTATION
Chomsky performed some experiments on rats
THE VALIDITY OF BEHAVIORISM
CRITIQUE
1-Behaviourist accounts of L2 acquisition emphasize only what can be directly
observed (input) and ignore what goes on in the black box of the learners
mind, viewing the learner as merely a language producing machine. There
was little room for any active processing by the learner. Its learning model is
demonstrated as:
A {input}

Reinforcement

A{Output}

But this model fails to reflect the true picture of childrens L2 acquisition in which the
output is different from the input:
A (input)

Reinforcement

A+ (output)

A+ is the multiplication resulted from the process of A in the black box. If the childs
linguistic output does not match the input, the explanation must lie in the internal
processing that has taken place, something that induced the Mantalists to go to another
extreme of innatist
.
2-Irregular Grammatical patterns
Behaviorism does not explain how children learn to handle irregular grammatical patterns
3-Languaoge a matter of maturation rather than imitation
Children seem unable to imitate exactly the adults grammatical structure at the
beginning. They learn these structures with the passage of time no matter how much
parents try to teach them. Thus language is a matter of maturation rather than imitation.

4-The most dramatic evidence against behaviorism is the fact that the children who can
not speak at all but who can hear normally acquire normal competence in language
comprehension.
5-Several kinds of evident suggest that imitation , in the sense of a childs attempt to
reproduce the adults actual utterances he hear does not play an important role in the
acquisition of syntax.
5-One of the relatively empirical problem is that relatively few experiments have been
done with infants and that these have typically dealt with general effects on vocalization.
6-According to Chomsky arguments man is superior to animals with respect to language
acquisition so we can never apply the rules and principles to language learning which are
derived from the experiments on animal.
7-For Chomsky the acquisition of incredibly complex language by children can not
simply be explained by imitation. It definitely has something to do with innate
capabilities
CONCLUSION
The above two theories can not give satisfactory answers to SLA, because each goes to a
polar extreme. The debate between behaviourism and mentalism arises the theory of
cognitivism, which agrees with the mentalists that children must make use of innate
knowledge, but disagrees about its nature. Cognitivism, on one hand admits the active
processing by the learner, and on the other hand attaches much importance to the input
and the interaction between internal and external factors.