Language: Innate Or Learned Essay, Research Paper
Language: Innate or Learned
Language, are we born with it or do we learn it? There s a lot to debate on this subject. There are several points of view from psychologists, medical doctors, linguists and parents. John B. Watson, believed that the environment was responsible for shaping children s development. His views were consistent with those of behaviorism, an approach to psychology that had a great impact on research about children. Although behaviorists emphasize environment, they almost always deny the influence of biological variables on development. Their basic assumptions are that the mind of a newborn child is a blank slate and that all behaviors are determined by environmental events; and differences among children are the result of those environmental variables. Behaviorists encouraged experimental studies and were responsible for moving child psychology into the mainstream of psychology. Although they contributed much to the study of children, their concepts eventually were viewed as being overly narrow. Jean Piaget, had been writing about children s cognitive development since the 1920 s. Piaget called himself a genetic epistemologist; that is, a person who studies the origins of human knowledge and his theories led to more advanced work in child psychology. This work involves both experimental and observational methods and, in accounting for behavior, integrates biological and environmental variables. Piaget believes that language must be innate because deaf children eventually learn language and how to use it in social situations. The ability to communicate and to understand language is a major achievement of human beings. An amazing feature of language development is the speed with which it is acquired: The first word is spoken at about 12 months; by two years of age most children have vocabularies of about 270 words, and this increases to 2600 words at the age of six. It is almost impossible to determine the number of sentence constructions that can be generated within a single language. Children, however, use syntactically correct sentences by the age of three and highly complex constructions by the age of five. This extraordinary phenomenon cannot be explained by means of simple learning theory. The American linguist Noam Chomsky postulated that the human brain is especially constructed to detect and reproduce language; the mental system does not require formal learning and will function perfectly when language is available to the child. Although developmental psycholinguists do not agree with all of Chomsky s concepts, they do accept the idea of special mental language systems. Linguists believe that young children have certain innate characteristics that predispose them to learn language. These characteristics include the structure of the vocal tract, which enables children to make the sounds used in language, and the ability to understand a number of general grammatical principles, such as the hierarchical nature of syntax. These characteristics, however, do not limit
Bibliography
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