Language Development in the Child Learning an

There are as many definitions of learning as there are dictionaries, psychologists, and educators. Ellington & Harris (1986) see learning as "a relatively permanent change in behavior that results from past experience or purposeful instruction." Page & Thomas (1977) stress that "it is important to realize that learning need not be correct, deliberate, or overt." Whatever the school of thought, in modern pedagogy learning is characterized by a change in the stable relationship between a stimulus that an individual perceives, and the response that is made, either covertly or overtly. Learning, in other words, is "behavioral modification especially through experience or conditioning" (The American Heritage Dictionary).

By definition, then, learning infers malleability, i.e. adaptability, tractability of the organism subjected to internal or external forces which modify its active and reactive status. To understand how any organism learns, one must first understand the nature and extent of its malleability and the dynamism of its altered state. Two questions spring to mind: "What does it take to cause behavioral changes in the child? and "How permanent are these changes?" And the fundamental question is: "How plastic is the developing organism called 'child'?"

One wonders also as to the variables that cause or otherwise affect plasticity in the child in terms of behavioral acquisitions--suc

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aradigms or developed linguistic nomenclatures consciously. "Our traditional and popularly held view about how children learn language is that they do it by imitating their parents and by receiving feedback from their parents who correct their erroneous speech... This view is consonant with empiricist philosophy (the philosophical basis of the work of Werner Leopold and Madorah Smith) and its psychological disciple of behaviorism (Hakuta, 1985, p. 109). Noam Chomsky disputed these views. He argued that attempts to derive linguistic knowledge from externally observable (hence "experienceable") data were inadequate. For Chomsky, language was an abstract activity which could not be molded by external sources. It had to be derived from knowledge that was already resident in the child. Seen from another tack, "The study of children's verbal language is based on competence-performance distinction... Linguistic performance concerns the study of human factors that explain why we use language the way we do. The limitations of our memory in producing and understanding sentences constitute one performance factor. Others include shifts of attention, distractions, and the like. Once we have characterized the structure and form of ch
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Approximate Pages = 33 (250 words per page)

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