PSYCH 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Language Acquisition, Universal Grammar, Grammar
9 Mar 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
7. 5 identify the major perspectives on language acquisition, and summarize the strengths and weaknesses of each. 7. 6 compare and contrast the different theories about the relationship between language and thought. Learning theory approaches: language as a learned skill. Language acquisition follows the basic laws of reinforcement and conditioning: through the process of shaping, language becomes more and more similar to adult speech, children learn to speak by being rewarded for making sounds that approximate speech. Nativist approaches: language as an innate skill: genetically determined, innate mechanism that directs the development of language, children are born with innate capacity to use language, which emerges, more or less automatically, due to maturation. Chomsky"s universal grammar and language-acquisition device (lad: nativist approach argues that there is a genetically determined, innate mechanism that directs the development of language. Chomsky"s analysis of different languages suggests that all the world"s languages share a similar underlying structure, which he calls universal grammar.
