Theories Of Language Acquisition

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This written report has the purpose of informing students in a Health and Human Development class how a child acquires language. In this report, I will discuss the major theories of child language acquisition, identify the developmental stages of language acquisition and explore changes in the functions of language as a child transitions from babyhood to early adolescence.

Major theories of Language Acqusition

Many linguists have developed theories on how a child acquires language. However, none of these theories fully explains how this process occurs. All proposed theories will commonly fall into two main categories- Nature or Nurture. Nature refers to the innate ability babies are born with which allows the baby to acquire a language. We are biologically programmed to learn a language. Whereas, Nurture theories supports the belief that the environmental factors are what allow the baby to acquire language.

Below are the 4 main theories on Language Acquisition:

Nature:
The Nativist approach

The Nativist approach by Noam Chomsky, an American linguist believes that children are born with the innate capacity to process and learn language. Children are programmed or wired to make sense of words and utterances after being exposed to language in its surroundings. An innate feature, named LAD (Language Acquisition device) is responsible for the quick development of language acquisition in a child. Chomsky believes that all humans are born with a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in our brains which enables children to distinguish language more proficiently, and also provides children with innate understanding of underlying grammatical rules of their native language.

Examples to support Noam Chomsk...

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...bject] or combinations of three and four words. Inflections and suffixes are used more frequently .They start to use suffixes such as ‘-ed’, but most will be overused before standardization occurs. For example, stole is said to be stealed. They also learn to incorporate auxiliary verbs and modal auxiliaries at the age of 3 such as ‘little pigs always having fun’. They are more active in engaging in discourse and also start to amend their mistakes after being corrected by an adult. Children’s speech development improves drastically at this stage as their grammar becomes more consistent along with longer utterances containing more sophisticated lexemes
Beyond the age of three, the child continues to broaden their range of lexicons and begins to use increasingly complex structures and lexemes in their sentence which enables them to engage in discourse more fluently.

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