Explaining the Mystery of Language Acquisition

The fierce debate between the rationalist and the empiricist theorists on the issue of language acquisition has captured the imagination of the linguistic world for decades. Even though each group has produced results that contribute to the research on language acquisition, the complete process of language acquisition still remains a mystery. While the rationalists' concept of specific language mechanisms in the brain has prevailed for many years, new research by connectionist theorists has tilted the balance towards the empiricists' approach.

In this paper, the two competing approaches will be examined and compared in detail. Their application in children's discourse will be explored to assess their validity. Finally, the work by the connectionist theorists and the implications on the future of linguistic research in the area of first language acquisition will be discussed.

Comparing rationalist type and empiricist type theories in first language acquisition

First promulgated by Noam Chomsky (1965), the rationalist or the "inside-out" family of theories establishes the presence of unique brain mechanisms dedicated to the function of language acquisition. In this model, the children already possess tremendous linguistic knowledge. Only with innate linguistic knowledge can children possibly overcome the complexities of language acquisition (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996, p. 18). Therefore, the environment does not play a pr

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ributes to the language acquisition, Slobin (1985) highlights the "Operating Principles" (OPs) that enable children to pick up linguistic knowledge. For example, children learn to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar patterns in various words or sentences (p. 1165). By gathering, categorizing and counting their speech data, children can amass their pool of linguistic knowledge (Slobin, 1985, p. 1167). Both of these empiricist approaches fail to provide an adequate explanation of the process of language acquisition. In most of the studies, the research take for granted the linguistic knowledge already possessed by the subjects in their ability to perform language-learning tasks. Therefore, they cannot explain the pre-existence of the children's seemingly innate language abilities. Furthermore, these theorists tend to oversimplify the relationship between language acquisition and the interaction with the environment. Although they claim that there is a direct correspondence between the children's relationship with their environment and their language abilities, these theorists cannot account for the children's mastery of abstract concepts that are not present in the environment (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996, pp. 24-5).
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3137
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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