Changing the Perception on Language Acquisition

man has the instinctive tendency to

speak as we see in the babble of our

young children

but no child has the instinctive

tendency to bake brew or write

this quote was by charles darwin

naturalist biologist and geologist

best known for his fear and evolution so

what he meant in this quote

is that language is a human instinct and

comes naturally to us

but things such as baking and writing

has to be taught through instruction and

schooling

so when i first heard about language i

thought language was all about using the

vocal cords

larynx and speaking but i realized

that’s not all to it

language is also the ability to absorb

and comprehend

sentences and to use grammar and i

believe that larynx and

using our whole chords is a

communication aspect of it

so let’s take an example asl users

american sign language users use hand

gesture to communicate

just like how we use speaking to to

communicate as well

they use asl like their hand gestures in

order to make grammar

to make sentences and just similar to

what we can do with our voice

in the 1980s nicaragua put all their

definite students all in one school

they had no other prior knowledge to any

sign or spoken language beforehand

and while the teachers were trying to

figure out a way in order to communicate

to them so that they could teach them of

course

students were able to come up with their

own sign language known as

the nicaragua also known as ism this

sign language

had a proper grammar as well as proper

sentence structure and had complex

sentences as well

these students were able to come up with

the language of what seems like thin air

but was it really out of thin air here’s

where the

linguist noam chomsky comes in in the

1960s he came with a controversial idea

of the language acquisition device where

we have language processing structures

in our brains

we can reduce complex sentences to

things such as nouns

verbs and adjectives and there was also

someone else who supported this idea

and this is i’m sure a familiar name to

most of us plato an athenian philosopher

back in ancient greece plato believed in

the idea of inatism

where we are born with some knowledge

from birth and he included one of these

knowledges as language however there was

many people totally against this idea

and one of these people was john locke

an english philosopher in the 1600s

he believed in the idea of a tabula rasa

where we

are also known as a blank slate where

everything we know now is all just

taught to us

and everything and nothing is innate or

inborn

and this is similar to what beef skinner

an american psychologist in the 1900s

believed in so when noam chomsky first

said this theory back in the 1960s

bf skinner’s idea about opera and

conditioning where basically he said

that we learn language

through rewards and punishments that was

the most popular theory at the time and

most

widely accepted

in operant conditioning there’s three

types of responses

neutral operance rewards

and punishers so how did he experiment

this

so what he did was that he used a box

and he put a rat in it

with a lever and a food pot so that

whenever i hit the lever a food pellet

would drop down

so after some time the red accidentally

hit against the sides of the box

and accidentally hit the lever and then

got a food pellet so now

the rat learned that if it did the same

sort of pattern of events it would

continue to get its food pellet

and this reinforces the fact that

rewards can encourage a behavior

so in the second part of the experiment

bf scanner made it so that whenever the

right sides of the box

an electric current would shoot up so

now what the rat did was that it went

directly to the lever so that it could

avoid being shocked

so let’s take another example for

example

every time you don’t do your homework

you have to pay your teacher

so now you would just do the homework so

you could avoid that all together

now there’s also punishers in operant

conditioning as well where meaning it

would discourage you from doing that

behavior

so such as it would discourage you from

doing your homework or just and

discourage the rat from going to the

lever and then getting food fell

for example maybe if you poisoned the

food pellet it would avoid going

trying to eat it now this makes perfect

sense for behaviors as we can see what

happens with the wrap

but it doesn’t make complete sense for

language for starters we simply have not

been trained what to say

now i’m sure a lot of you are probably

raising your eyebrows right now but it

makes sense

i’m sure we’ve all noticed that children

can make simple mistakes

such as things saying things i hold it

now you wouldn’t say this this isn’t

proper grammar you will say i held it

but if you really think about it the

child is using

hold the verb hold in the right

placement of the sentence

and also this proves that this cannot be

an imitation as i’m sure the parents

would never say i

holded it but rather they would say i

held it

and this shows that this baby or this

child has an innate ability for language

and it’s a human instinct to use

sentence structures

and also speaking from personal

experience i remember when i was younger

making these type of mistakes frequently

and it’s not like any of my

fellow adults surrounding me ever said

something like this and i would

also make nonsensical sentences that i’m

sure no one would have ever made around

me

now in order to test noom chomsky’s

theory even more

another study was done in at columbia

university using a chimpanzee known as

nimchinsky and yes this chimpanzee was

named after noam chomsky of course

so this champ was raised just like a

human being

it was taught asl and just hand gesture

so that it would be able to communicate

to see

and they wanted to see how the

progression of this chimpanzee would be

so after some time when they decided to

review this chip to see how it was doing

they realized something yes the

chipmizer was able to make simple

sentences to ask

like i want food but it was nowhere as

complex of what humans could do

and humans are able to use language in

order to express

feeling and to use emotions but this is

simply not what a chimpanzee could do

and this shows the language is something

special to humans and something that’s a

human instinct and cannot be taught or

learned now there’s still a debate going

on to this day

about how norman trump’s he’s theory

doesn’t have enough evidence and it’s

very far-fetched

and while i would argue that this idea

of language acquisition device

spearheaded many linguistic studies and

made so many more theories down the line

as well as changing many on how they

perceive that acquisition of

language and i believe that

motorists is a language and that it’s

all about the cognition

so that now we should focus more on how

the brain works whenever someone uses

language

so we can find out about how language is

exactly required and we can know more

about it

and this is what i call change thank you