PSY210H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Syntactic Bootstrapping, 6 Years, Metalinguistic Awareness
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And by using receptive language, we receive communication from others. Morphology is the study of morphemes: syntax is a subdivision of grammar that prescribes how words are to be combined into phrases, clauses, and sentences. For example, there are rules to express negation, interrogation, possession, etc: pragmatics is a set of rules that specifies appropriate language for particular social contexts. The learning view: the learning theorist b. f. skinner used the principle of reinforcement to explain language development. He posited that parents/caregivers selectively reinforce each of the child"s babbling sounds that are most similar to adult speech. Then, by reinforcement and generalization, he learns which situations it is appropriate to say these words and phrases. Arguments against this view: the learning view alone is not enough to explain language acquisition for many reasons. Linguist noam chomsky proposed that children are born with an innate mental structure that guides their acquisition of language.
