Summary

                     The Role of the Linguistic Environment

Adult Input

The inquisition of language is doubtless the greatest intelectual feat anyone of us is ever required to perform.

Children deprived of linguistic input show a clear drive to acquire language and may even create a rudimentary linguistic system, as illustrated by deaf children who create home signs. but there is little doubt that children require a language environment to develop a mature linguistic system.  Other approaches to understanding language acquisition afford a much more pronounced and formative role to the input provided by adults. Other approaches to understanding language acquisition afford a much more pronounced and formative role to the input provided by adults. This is especially true of early theories of language acquisition which were heavily influenced by behaviorism, a school of psycology prevalent in the 1950s. Language was viewed as a kind of verbal behavior, and it was proposed that children learn language through imitation, reinforcement, analogy, and similar procesesses. On this view the adult input and feedback to the child was paramount.  Noam Chomsky  showed that language is a complex cognitive system that could not be acquired by behaviorist principles.

The Role of Imitation, Reinforcement, and Analogy

Imitation: A proposed mechanism of child language acquisition, according to which children learn their language by imitating adult speech.  Is  involved to some extent of course . An American child hears milk and a Mexican child leche and each child attempts to reproduce to reproduce what he hears. Many times  the words are barely recognizable to an adult and the meanings are also not always like the adult’s. Imitation also fails to account for the fact that children who are unable to speak for neurologycal or psycological reasons are able to learn  the language spoken to them and understand it

Reinforcement:  the action of causing a subject to learn to give or to increase the frequency of a desired response that in classical conditioning involves the repeated presentation of an unconditioned stimulus.  One researcher concluded somewhat wryly that it is "truth value rather than sytactic well-formedness that chiefly governs explicit verbal reinforcement by parents.

Analogy: the use of one form as an exemplar by which other forms can be similarly constructed: based on bow/ bows, sows/ sows. It has also  been suggested that children put words together to form phrases and sentences by analogy , by hearing a sentence and using it as a model to form other sentences. In some sense this must be true. The problem with analogy lis that the child must also know when the general rule does not work. as one developmental psycholinguistic explains: Suppose the child has heard the sentence "I painted a red barn." So now by analogy, the child can say "I painted a blue barn". That exactly the kind of theory that we want. This is an analogy, but the analogy didn't work. It's not a sentence of English.  Children do not make syntactic errors of this sort. They may overgeneralize a morphological rule or omit functional elements.

The Role of Structured Input

Yet another suggestion is that children are able to learn language because adults speak to them in a special “simplified” language sometimes called motherese, or child-directed speech (CDS) (or more informally, baby talk). This hypotesis also places a lot of emphasis on the roleof the environment in facilitating language acquisition.

In Conclusion The child does not develop linguistically because he is exposed to over more adultlike language. Rather the adult adjusts his language to the child's increasing linguistic sophistication. Imitation, reinforcement, and analogy can't account for language development because they are based on the assumption that what the child acquires is a set of sentences or forms rather than a set of grammatical rules and linguistic structures.