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