Lightbown & Spada – Chapter 1

UFSC/CCE/DLLE

LLE7051 – LINGUISTICA APLICADA I

Prof. Marcos Morgado

STUDY QUESTIONS

Lightbown & Spada – Chapter 1

1. Explain the behaviourist perspective of language acquisition. Point out two utterances from the transcripts in the he chapter which support that perspective and two which show children doing something more sophisticated than repetition.

1. What is the innatist position of language acquisition? Summarise some of the arguments supporting it.

The innatist perspective says that language is stored in the mind, and that all human languages are fundamentally innate, and that the same universal principles underlie all of them. Innatists argue that children are biologically programmed for language and that language develops in the child in just the same way that other biological functions develop. The environment would only make a basic contribution. They argue that children come to know more about the structure of their language than they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language they hear. For the innatists, what children has to learn is the ways in which the language they are acquiring makes use of the principles. Another argument used to support it is that children achieve different levels of vocabulary, creativity, social grace, and so on, but virtually all achieve mastery of the structure of the language or languages spoken to them.

1. What are the strong and weak versions of the Critical Period Hypothesis? Why is evidence from deaf learners more convincing than evidence from children like Victor and Genie?

- Strong: the Elissa Newport and colleagues studies about deaf users of american sign language

- Weak: Victor and Genie experiences

Because "although Victor and Genie appear to provide evidence in support of the CPH, it is difficult to argue that the hypothesis is confirmed on the basis of evidence from such unusual cases."

1. How do the interactionist/developmental perspectives differ from the behaviourist/innatist positions of language acquisition? How do Piaget and Vygotsky view language development?

Interactionist/developmental perspectives argue that the behaviourist/innatist position place too much emphasis on the 'final state' ("the competence of adult native speakers" and not enough on the developmental aspects of language acquisition. "In their view, language acquisition is but one example of the human child's remarkable ability to learn from experience, and they see no need to assume that there are specific brain structures devoted to language acquisition. They hypothesize that what children need to know is essentially available in the language they are exposed to as they hear it used in thousands of hours of interactions with the people and objects around them."

- Piaget: "saw language as a symbol system that could be used to express knowledge acquired through interaction with the physical world"

- Vygotsky: "through was essentially internalized speech, and speech emerged in social interaction", "zone of proximal development": place in which the children could do more than they would be capable of independently.

1. What are some characteristics of child-directed speech? Why is it difficult to judge its importance for language acquisition? What is the importance of interaction?

Researchers have found that "the kind of child-directed speech observed in middle-class American homes is by no means universal. In some societies, adults do not engage in conversation or verbal play with very young children." Some did not consider their children "to be appropriate conversational partners" and in some societies children "are not expected or encouraged to participate in conversations with adults until they are older and have more developed language skills".

...