Child Language Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Child Language - Essay ExampleThey carry asserted that behaviorist explanations of quarrel acquisition cannot account for it. According to the behaviorists, to as certain language is to learn a sequence of stimulus-response links. The childs internalized rules (the sneer quotes are the behaviorists, who does not deign to wasting disease much(prenominal) language) are similar to the rules involved in get sequences like brushing ones teeth and tying shoe laces, or in any other well-learned motor activity. Against this, Chomsky and his followers have argued that the child cannot be hard maintained to have learned a different set of stimulus-response links for each utterance he makes (Chomsky, 1965). Life is too short for learning entirely the word strings we use.According to the semantic approach the child learns how different meanings are expressed by different sentence structures ( Quine, 1972). One might have expected such an approach to be formulated very soon as a reaction against behaviorist explanations, with their complete neglect of meaning. But such was the stranglehold of behaviorism on theory construction that the semantic approach was not formulated for a long time. The behaviorist edifice succumbed only to the aggressive attacks of Noam Chomsky. Chomskys linguistic theory, transformational grammar, gave rise to an alternative approach to language (Chomsky, 1986).Chomsky as a bChomsky as a behaviorist conceptualizes discrimination learning in language Discrimination learning ensues when adult use of a word conflicts with that of the child. The process will be somewhat as follows (Baker, and McCarthy, 1981) (1) the child encounters something that reminds him of a paired referent, whether because it resembles it or because it was previously experienced in contiguity with it (2) the adult uses for this new instance a word which differs from that learned for the paired referent and subsequently (3) the child notices certain salient attributes in which the new instance differs from the paired referent. For instance, (1) the child sees a horse cavalry that reminds him of the referent of the previously learned word doggie (2) the adult calls it horse and (3) the child notices that the horse, unlike doggie, has a mane. The latter property may henceforward operate as a discriminating cue It will be a NEGATIVE CUE for the word doggie, and a POSITIVE CUE for the word horse. To forestall a possible misunderstanding, I want to set out that this earlier discussion is intended to explain how the child delimits the use of words, and not how he acquires distinctions between things. That is, the previously discussed process is not claimed to lead to his distinguishing between, for example, dogs and horses. On the contrary, the ability to make such a distinction--on the basis of differentiating properties, such as the horses mane--is presupposed here (for, otherwise, how could he ever find out when to use doggie and when to use horse). The child may become aware of the difference between a horse and a dog--or between two different dogs, for that matter--without adult prompting. The exhaust here, however, is the childs use of words To learn the correct use of a word it is not sufficient just to perceive differences between referents, but the child must also observe how these differences correlate with the applicability and nonapplicability of the word ( Wexler & Culicover, 1980). The child is innately not acquiring the correct grammar