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Nature" Theories

Well before there were empirical methods for testing theories that were developed, Philosophers in ancient societies were interested in how humans acquired the ability to understand and produce language. For the most part, these Philosophers seemed to regard language acquisition as a subset of man's ability to acquire knowledge and learn concepts.[1] Some early observation based ideas about language acquisition were proposed by Plato, who felt that word-meaning mapping in some form was innate. Additionally, Sanskrit grammarians debated for over twelve centuries whether humans' ability to recognize the meaning of words was god-given (possibly innate) or passed down by previous generations and learned from already established conventions —e.g. a child learning the word for cow by listening to trusted speakers talking about cows.[2].

Below is a look at three "current" theories: Generativism, Nurture Theories and Behaviorism.

"Generativism" Generative grammar, is currently one of the principal approaches to children's acquisition of syntax.[3]. This is mostly associated with the work of Norm Chomshy. The leading idea here, is that human biology imposes narrow constraints on the child's "hypothesis space" during language acquisition. In the Principles and Parameters Framework, which has dominated generative syntax since Chomsky's (1980) Lectures on Government and Binding, the acquisition of syntax resembles ordering from a menu: The human brain comes equipped with a limited set of choices, and the child selects the correct options using her parents' speech, in combination with the context.[4][5]

An important argument in favor of the generative approach is the Poverty of the stimulus argument. In this instance, the child's input (a finite number of sentences encountered by the child, together with information about the context in which they were uttered) is in principle compatible with an infinite number of conceivable grammars. Furthermore, few if any children can rely on corrective feedback from adults when they make a grammatical error.[6] However, barring situations of medical abnormality or extreme privation, all the children in a given speech-community converge on very much the same grammar by the age of about five years.[4] An especially dramatic example of this is provided by children, who for medical reasons, are unable to produce speech and therefore can literally never be corrected for a grammatical error. Nevertheless, according to comprehension-based tests of grammar,these children converge on the same grammar as their typically developing peers.[7][8].

Considerations such as these have led Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Eric Lenneberg and others to argue, that the types of grammar that the child needs to consider must be narrowly constrained by human biology (the nativist position).[9] These innate constraints are sometimes referred to as universal grammar, the human "language faculty," or the "language instinct." [10]

"Nurture" Theories In a more modern context, Empiricists like Hobbes and Locke argued that knowledge (and for Locke, language) emerge ultimately from abstracted sense impressions. These arguments lean towards the "nurture" side of the argument; that language is acquired through sensory experience. This way of thinking also led to Carnap's "Aufbau", (as Carnaps work is commonly termed); which states an attempt to learn all knowledge from sense datum. Carnap used the notion of "remembered as similar" to bind these into clusters, which would eventually map into language.

"Behaviorism" In B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour (1957), he suggested that the successful use of a sign such as a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus, reinforces its "momentary" or contextual probability. Proponents of Behaviorism argued that language may be learned through a form of operant conditioning. Because operant conditioning is contingent on reinforcement by rewards, a child would learn that a specific combination of sounds stands for a specific thing through repeated, successful associations made between those two things. A "successful" use of a sign would be one in which the child is understood (for example, a child saying "up" when he or she wants to be picked up) and is rewarded with the desired response from another person. Based on this, it is believed that reinforcing the child's understanding of the meaning of that word will make it more likely that the child will use that word in a similar situation in the future. However, Skinner's behaviourist idea was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky in a review article in 1959, calling it "largely mythology" and a "serious delusion".[11] Chomsky argued for a more theoretical approach to language acquisition, based on a study of syntax. Others, such as Empiricist theories of language acquisition, include statistical learning theories of language acquisition. Some examples are; Relational Frame Theory, Functionalist Linguistics, Social Interactionist Theory, and Usage-Based Language Acquisition.