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B.F. Skinner
Behaviorist Theory:
 | Behaviorist hypothesized children
learn their first language through the same process of stimulus, response, and
reinforcement. |
| Children acquire their language as
a result of the interaction between parents, care gives and other young
children. |
| Children's language development
comes as a result of imitating and associating the stimulus to which they are
exposed and as it is reinforced by their parents or caregivers. |
Examples: Parent talks to children using gesturing, demonstrating, showing, and
telling- Child produces some form of utterance/speech- Parent praises (which
encourages the behavior)
Innatist Theory:
| Hypothesized that infants were
born with a biological language acquisition device (LAD) |
| Infants universally possess an
innate "grammar template" or universal grammar that allows them to select out
the many grammatical rules of the language they hear spoken around them, they
gradually construct the grammar of their own native language
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| Children construct grammar through
a process of hypothesis test |
| Rules that all past tense of verbs
are formed by adding -ed |
| Face with the verb to go, the
child says "goed" |
| Eventually children revise their
hypothesis to accommodate exception of the past tense of irregular verbs |
| Children create sentences by using
rules rather than by merely repeating what they have heard |
Interactionist Theory
| Piaget, Bloom, Slobin |
| Language is directly related to cognitive development |
| Great importance on social interactions in the development of language |
| Nature/Nurture interaction between the innate ability to acquire language
and the role of the social environment |
| Children's language develops over time and with many instances of the same
of similar interactions |
| Example: The word "daddy" how many times do they actually hear it and the
number of encounters with the words |
| It is important to acknowledge the importance of both factors |
| Language cannot develop fully without the child's innate ability and the
sociolinguistic interaction that occur as the child grows and develops |
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