Language Acquisition

Bohannon and Warren (1989) summarize the major features of and describe relevant supporting and contrary research in five theoretical approaches to explaining hoe language development occurs: the behavioral approach, linguistic approach, cognitive approach, information-processing approach, and the social-interactionist approach.

The behavioral approach to explain language development owes much to B.F. Skinner's ideas about conditioning subjects (in the case of language development, principally children who are learning to talk) to affect particular behavior patterns. The idea is to reinforce acceptable language choices with positive response, so as to encourage the development of such choices. Bohannon and Warren-Leubecker make two general points about behaviorist research. First, they note the focus on imitation, called "imitation training" (1989, p. 192) as a technique of achieving language development, which appears to have been effective in training children to "use the targeted linguistic rule

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o combine elements of the behavior model and the linguistic model. The concept of competition of words for making meaning is the real center of this theory. Any word or language unit such as a sentence, in this view, has a variety of associations, and over time, by a process of elimination, the inappropriate associations will be discarded and appropriate language forms will be settled on as having meaning. The feature of repetition and elimination of unacceptable language units is connected to behaviorism, but the process by which unacceptable units are eliminated is connected to the linguistic theory of an internal or innate grammar structure. Bohannon and Luebecker (1989) note that no contrary research exists because this approach is a new theory. However, they also note that the information-processing model virtually ignores the role of external input in affecting how competition for meanings might occur. In other words, there may be an observable connection between competition and reaching meaning, but this does not mean competition caused meaning. This is the unproved and perhaps unprovable feature of this theory. The social-interactionist theory combines features of "children's linguistic and cognitive capacities and their
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Approximate Word count = 1708
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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