language acquisition meaning essay

Language Acquisition Theory

Henna Lemetyinen

Postdoctoral Researcher

BSc (Hons), Psychology, PhD, Developmental Psychology

Henna Lemetyinen is a postdoctoral research associate at the Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (GMMH).

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Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

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Language is a cognition that truly makes us human. Whereas other species do communicate with an innate ability to produce a limited number of meaningful vocalizations (e.g., bonobos) or even with partially learned systems (e.g., bird songs), there is no other species known to date that can express infinite ideas (sentences) with a limited set of symbols (speech sounds and words).

This ability is remarkable in itself. What makes it even more remarkable is that researchers are finding evidence for mastery of this complex skill in increasingly younger children.

Infants as young as 12 months are reported to have sensitivity to the grammar needed to understand causative sentences (who did what to whom; e.g., the bunny pushed the frog (Rowland & Noble, 2010).

After more than 60 years of research into child language development, the mechanism that enables children to segment syllables and words out of the strings of sounds they hear and to acquire grammar to understand and produce language is still quite an enigma.

Behaviorist Theory of Language Acquisition

One of the earliest scientific explanations of language acquisition was provided by Skinner (1957). As one of the pioneers of behaviorism , he accounted for language development using environmental influence, through imitation, reinforcement, and conditioning.

In this view, children learn words and grammar primarily by mimicking the speech they hear and receiving positive feedback for correct usage.

Skinner argued that children learn language based on behaviorist reinforcement principles by associating words with meanings. Correct utterances are positively reinforced when the child realizes the communicative value of words and phrases.

For example, when the child says ‘milk’ and the mother smiles and gives her some. As a result, the child will find this outcome rewarding, enhancing the child’s language development (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011).

Over time, through repetition and reinforcement, they refine their linguistic abilities. Critics argue this theory doesn’t fully explain the rapid pace of language acquisition nor the creation of novel sentences.

Chomsky Theory of Language Development

However, Skinner’s account was soon heavily criticized by Noam Chomsky, the world’s most famous linguist to date.

In the spirit of the cognitive revolution in the 1950s, Chomsky argued that children would never acquire the tools needed for processing an infinite number of sentences if the language acquisition mechanism was dependent on language input alone.

Noam Chomsky introduced the nativist theory of language development, emphasizing the role of innate structures and mechanisms in the human brain. Key points of Chomsky’s theory include:

Language Acquisition Device (LAD): Chomsky proposed that humans have an inborn biological capacity for language, often termed the LAD, which predisposes them to acquire language.

Universal Grammar: He suggested that all human languages share a deep structure rooted in a set of grammatical rules and categories. This “universal grammar” is understood intuitively by all humans.

Poverty of the Stimulus: Chomsky argued that the linguistic input received by young children is often insufficient (or “impoverished”) for them to learn the complexities of their native language solely through imitation or reinforcement. Yet, children rapidly and consistently master their native language, pointing to inherent cognitive structures.

Critical Period: Chomsky, along with other linguists, posited a critical period for language acquisition, during which the brain is particularly receptive to linguistic input, making language learning more efficient.

Critics of Chomsky’s theory argue that it’s too innatist and doesn’t give enough weight to social interaction and other factors in language acquisition.

Universal Grammar

Consequently, he proposed the theory of Universal Grammar: an idea of innate, biological grammatical categories, such as a noun category and a verb category, that facilitate the entire language development in children and overall language processing in adults.

Universal Grammar contains all the grammatical information needed to combine these categories, e.g., nouns and verbs, into phrases. The child’s task is just to learn the words of her language (Ambridge & Lieven).

For example, according to the Universal Grammar account, children instinctively know how to combine a noun (e.g., a boy) and a verb (to eat) into a meaningful, correct phrase (A boy eats).

This Chomskian (1965) approach to language acquisition has inspired hundreds of scholars to investigate the nature of these assumed grammatical categories, and the research is still ongoing.

Contemporary Research

A decade or two later, some psycho-linguists began to question the existence of Universal Grammar. They argued that categories like nouns and verbs are biologically, evolutionarily, and psychologically implausible and that the field called for an account that can explain the acquisition process without innate categories.

Researchers started to suggest that instead of having a language-specific mechanism for language processing, children might utilize general cognitive and learning principles.

Whereas researchers approaching the language acquisition problem from the perspective of Universal Grammar argue for early full productivity, i.e., early adult-like knowledge of the language, the opposing constructivist investigators argue for a more gradual developmental process. It is suggested that children are sensitive to patterns in language which enables the acquisition process.

An example of this gradual pattern learning is morphology acquisition. Morphemes are the smallest grammatical markers, or units, in language that alter words. In English, regular plurals are marked with an –s morpheme (e.g., dog+s).

Similarly, English third singular verb forms (she eat+s, a boy kick+s) are marked with the –s morpheme. Children are considered to acquire their first instances of third singular forms as entire phrasal chunks (Daddy kicks, a girl eats, a dog barks) without the ability to tease the finest grammatical components apart.

When the child hears a sufficient number of instances of a linguistic construction (i.e., the third singular verb form), she will detect patterns across the utterances she has heard. In this case, the repeated pattern is the –s marker in this particular verb form.

As a result of many repetitions and examples of the –s marker in different verbs, the child will acquire sophisticated knowledge that, in English, verbs must be marked with an –s morpheme in the third singular form (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011; Pine, Conti-Ramsden, Joseph, Lieven & Serratrice, 2008; Theakson & Lieven, 2005).

Approaching language acquisition from the perspective of general cognitive processing is an economic account of how children can learn their first language without an excessive biolinguistic mechanism.

However, finding a solid answer to the problem of language acquisition is far from being over. Our current understanding of the developmental process is still immature.

Investigators of Universal Grammar are still trying to convince that language is a task too demanding to acquire without specific innate equipment, whereas constructivist researchers are fiercely arguing for the importance of linguistic input.

The biggest questions, however, are yet unanswered. What is the exact process that transforms the child’s utterances into grammatically correct, adult-like speech? How much does the child need to be exposed to language to achieve the adult-like state?

What account can explain variation between languages and the language acquisition process in children acquiring very different languages to English? The mystery of language acquisition is granted to keep psychologists and linguists alike astonished decade after decade.

What is language acquisition?

Language acquisition refers to the process by which individuals learn and develop their native or second language.

It involves the acquisition of grammar, vocabulary, and communication skills through exposure, interaction, and cognitive development. This process typically occurs in childhood but can continue throughout life.

What is Skinner’s theory of language development?

Skinner’s theory of language development, also known as behaviorist theory, suggests that language is acquired through operant conditioning. According to Skinner, children learn language by imitating and being reinforced for correct responses.

He argued that language is a result of external stimuli and reinforcement, emphasizing the role of the environment in shaping linguistic behavior.

What is Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition?

Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition, known as Universal Grammar, posits that language is an innate capacity of humans.

According to Chomsky, children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD), a biological ability that enables them to acquire language rules and structures effortlessly.

He argues that there are universal grammar principles that guide language development across cultures and languages, suggesting that language acquisition is driven by innate linguistic knowledge rather than solely by environmental factors.

Ambridge, B., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2011). Language Acquisition: Contrasting theoretical approaches . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax . MIT Press.

Pine, J.M., Conti-Ramsden, G., Joseph, K.L., Lieven, E.V.M., & Serratrice, L. (2008). Tense over time: testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model as an account of the pattern of tense-marking provision in early child English. Journal of Child Language , 35(1): 55-75.

Rowland, C. F.; & Noble, C. L. (2010). The role of syntactic structure in children’s sentence comprehension: Evidence from the dative. Language Learning and Development , 7(1): 55-75.

Skinner, B.F. (1957). Verbal behavior . Acton, MA: Copley Publishing Group.

Theakston, A.L., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2005). The acquisition of auxiliaries BE and HAVE: an elicitation study. Journal of Child Language , 32(2): 587-616.

Article contents

Language acquisition.

Erica H. Wojcik , Erica H. Wojcik Department of Psychology, Skidmore College
Irene de la Cruz-Pavía Irene de la Cruz-Pavía Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Universite Paris Descartes
, and Janet F. Werker Janet F. Werker Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.56
Published online: 26 April 2017

Language is a structured form of communication that is unique to humans. Within the first few years of life, typically developing children can understand and produce full sentences in their native language or languages. For centuries, philosophers, psychologists, and linguists have debated how we acquire language with such ease and speed. Central to this debate has been whether the learning process is driven by innate capacities or information in the environment. In the field of psychology, researchers have moved beyond this dichotomy to examine how perceptual and cognitive biases may guide input-driven learning and how these biases may change with experience. There is evidence that this integration permeates the learning and development of all aspects of language—from sounds (phonology), to the meanings of words (lexical-semantics), to the forms of words and the structure of sentences (morphosyntax). For example, in the area of phonology, newborns’ bias to attend to speech over other signals facilitates early learning of the prosodic and phonemic properties of their native language(s). In the area of lexical-semantics, infants’ bias to attend to novelty aids in mapping new words to their referents. In morphosyntax, infants’ sensitivity to vowels, repetition, and phrase edges guides statistical learning. In each of these areas, too, new biases come into play throughout development, as infants gain more knowledge about their native language(s).

child development
lexical-semantics

Introduction

By the age of three, typically developing children have learned the sounds, words, and grammar of their language well enough to understand and produce multiword sentences. Unlike other complex systems such as math or music, humans learn language without explicit instruction. This amazing feat has fascinated philosophers, linguists, and psychologists for centuries.

The contemporary study of language within psychology can be traced to the late 1950s, when behaviorism was the most prominent theoretical perspective. Skinner published a behaviorist theory of language acquisition, suggesting that reinforcement and punishment shape “verbal behavior,” thus allowing young children to learn language (Skinner, 1957 ). Linguist Noam Chomsky wrote a scathing review of this work (Chomsky, 1959 ), pointing out aspects of language that could not be explained by a simple behaviorist account. He posed questions such as: How are children capable of generating sentences that they have never heard before? How can adults so easily tell whether a sentence is grammatical? To address these points, Chomsky proposed a theory called universal grammar , according to which there is an innate structure in the brain that allows humans to acquire, comprehend, and produce the complex rules of language. Input, he said, played only a minor role. Although Skinner’s book and Chomsky’s review primarily addressed syntax (or grammar) learning, their dialogue propelled the entire field of language acquisition towards investigating the power of input versus the power of innate capacities. The tension between these two pathways led to an explosion of discoveries about how children learn language.

Since the 1950s, researchers have developed a more integrative approach to language acquisition. Advances in behavioral, neuroimaging, and electrophysiological methods for studying development have led to discoveries of young infants’ powerful learning abilities (e.g., statistical learning; Saffran, 2003 ) and perceptual biases (e.g., a preference for listening to speech over other signals; Vouloumanos & Werker, 2007 ). Consequently, in this article, we suggest that instead of being primarily driven by the input or by innate capacities, infants and young children acquire language by using biases to guide an impressive ability to learn from input. While some biases are present at birth, others emerge or change throughout development as children learn more about their native language or languages and the world around them.

The following text explores this integrative perspective by surveying the mechanisms behind the processing and learning of spoken language in the first few years of life. While language knowledge continues to evolve throughout the lifespan, part of what makes language development an enigma is how early it occurs. Therefore, the current review focuses on infancy and early childhood to highlight the learning mechanisms that underlie this early development. We discuss language learning in three domains: phonology, lexical-semantics, and morphosyntax (sounds and prosody, words, and grammar, respectively). Although as a rough approximation, infants learn sounds before words and words before grammar, evidence is accruing that these processes influence each other throughout development, and thus we highlight this interweaving throughout this article.

Phonology: Speech Perception and Phonemic Development

From the moment they are born, infants show a number of neurobiological and perceptual biases that set them on the road to language acquisition, but that also show an effect of early experience. These biases, combined with an emerging set of input-driven, language-specific constraints, provide the foundation for infants’ developing ability to perceive, discriminate, and categorize the sounds of their native language(s).

Speech Perception and Discrimination

Preparation for acquiring any of the world’s languages is evident in the newborn preference for listening to speech over carefully matched nonspeech (Vouloumanos & Werker, 2007 ), their ability to discriminate similar speech sounds (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971 ; see Saffran, Werker, & Werner, 2006 , for a review), their sensitivity to acoustic phonetic cues that distinguish within as opposed to across word boundaries (Christophe et al., 1994 ), and their sensitivity to structural regularities among adjacent syllables (Gervain, Macagno, Cogoi, Peña, & Mehler, 2008 ). Moreover, the language areas of the brain are activated in tasks when young infants are presented with forward but not backward speech (Peña et al., 2003 ; Dehaene-Lambertz, Dehaene, & Hertz-Pannier, 2002 ), indicating neural specialization even at birth for human speech. Indeed, it is not just the acoustic characteristics of speech, but also the communicative intent (e.g., two people communicating, but using nonspeech sounds), that activates specialized areas in the brain (Shultz, Vouloumanos, Bennett, & Pelphrey, 2014 ).

While the neonate brain appears to be biased to process speech differently than other signals, the effect of the listening experience is evident at birth as well. Neonates show a preference for the language (or languages) heard in utero over an unfamiliar language (Moon, Cooper, & Fifer, 1993 ), as well as for their mother’s voice (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980 ), and even for vowel sounds played to them in utero (Moon, Lagercrantz, & Kuhl, 2013 ). Moreover, the pattern of neural activation to forward versus backward speech involves different brain activation in response to the native language than to an unfamiliar one (Minagawa-Kawai et al., 2011 ; May, Byers-Heinlein, Gervain, & Werker, 2011 ). Together, neurobiological and perceptual biases position infants to attend to and learn about the properties of any of the world’s languages, with a slight boost already in play for processing the language experienced in utero.

The languages of the world can be roughly classified into three rhythmical groups: those organized by stress recurrence, like English; those organized by syllable recurrence, like Spanish; and those organized by mora recurrence, like Japanese (Abercrombie, 1967 ). From the moment they are born, infants are sensitive to these differences and discriminate languages on the basis of rhythmical classes (Nazzi, Bertoncini, & Mehler, 1998 ). This capability is of extreme interest, as the rhythmical characteristics of languages are highly correlated with the underlying word order, and hence sensitivity to rhythm has been hypothesized to help bootstrap the acquisition of grammar (Mehler, Sebástian-Gallés, & Nespor, 2004 ; also see the section “Morphosyntax: Learning Grammar” ). Infants even show rhythmical class discrimination between familiar languages, as in the case of a newborn infant exposed to two languages throughout gestation (Byers-Heinlein, Burns, & Werker, 2010 ). Over the first four to five months of life, language discrimination sensitivity becomes refined such that by five months, infants growing up monolingual can discriminate their native language from a different language that belongs to the same rhythmical class (e.g., by this age, Dutch infants can discriminate Dutch from English; Nazzi, Jusczyk, & Johnson, 2000 ). Interestingly, bilingual infants succeed at within-rhythmical class language discrimination at a younger age (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 1997 ). Overall, infants’ early speech processing and discrimination begin with biases present at birth but are shaped by their early linguistic environment.

Phonemic Development

Perhaps the best-studied example of the interplay between perceptual biases and experience is the development of phonemic discrimination. From as early as they can be tested, infants discriminate the minimal differences between speech sounds that are used to contrast meaning in adult languages of the world (these are called phonemes ). Studies using both behavioral and neuroimaging or electrophysiological measures show that newborn and even premature infants discriminate both minimal consonant differences (as in/ba/ versus /da/) and minimal vowel differences (as in/i/ versus /a/; Mahmoudzadeh et al., 2013 ). Moreover, the discrimination of these distinctions involves similar language areas in the brain as are used for consonant and vowel discrimination in adults, although the lateralization to the left hemisphere is less evident than it is later in development, suggesting a role for experience in such specialization (Dehaene-Lambertz, 2000 ).

The effect of experience in phonemic discrimination can be further seen in the developmental changes across the first year of life. From birth to four to six months, infants discriminate not only the phonetic contrasts used in their native language environment, but also many nonnative speech phonetic differences, including ones that they have never heard before (e.g., Streeter, 1976 ; Werker, Gilbert, Humphrey & Tees, 1981 ). Across the next six months, their sensitivities become attuned to the native language, such that infants show a decline in discrimination of many nonnative speech sound differences (e.g., Werker & Tees, 1984 ) and an improvement in discrimination of native speech sound distinctions (Kuhl et al., 2006 ). This pattern of decline for nonnative sounds and improvement for native is referred to as perceptual narrowing . Although perceptual narrowing is the most typical pattern of phonetic development, there are other patterns as well. For example, in some cases, such as the word initial distinction between /n/ and /ng/ used in Filipino (Narayan, Werker, & Beddor, 2010 ), experience seems required to even induce initial discrimination. Of interest, bilingual infants maintain sensitivity to the phoneme distinctions of both of their native languages (see Sebastián-Gallés, 2010 , for a review). Thus, while early biases lay the bedrock, it is experience that leads to the development of expertise in native language phoneme perception.

While it is clear that the attunement to native phonemic discrimination is driven by the input, there is a growing body of research aimed at explaining the processes by which infants move from language-general to language-specific phonemic perception. Bottom-up approaches using artificial language studies have shown that infants aged six to eight months can track distributional frequency information and use it to both bifurcate and collapse potential phonetic distinctions (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002 ; Maye, Weiss, & Aslin, 2008 ). Top-down approaches have shown that infants can use the lexical context in which speech sounds occur (Swingley, 2009 ) and/or the potentially meaningful distinction between two words (Yeung & Werker, 2009 ) to establish native categories. Social-interaction also plays a role, as evidenced by work showing that infant phonetic categories are most easily attuned in face-to-face contingent interaction with an adult (Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu, 2003 ).

As native language phonemic categories come to dominate perceptual discrimination, they also play a role in driving word learning (Swingley, 2009 ; Curtin & Werker, 2007 ). While 14-month-olds can confuse minimally different words in some word learning tasks (Stager & Werker, 1997 ), when the processing demands are made more minimal or the task more obviously one of learning labels (Yoshida, Fennell, Swingley, & Werker, 2009 ; Fennell & Waxman, 2009 ), they can succeed in using native phonetic distinctions to guide even the learning of new words. By the time they are 18–20 months of age, it is how the native language uses the phonemes, not just their discriminability, that guides word learning (Dietrich, Swingley, & Werker, 2007 ). Thus, any condition or experience that interferes with phonetic discrimination in early infancy or the development of native phonemic categories, could in turn affect later word learning. Indeed, there is a correlation between perceptual narrowing in infancy and later vocabulary size in childhood (Tsao, Liu, & Kuhl, 2004 ).

Multimodal Influences on Phonemic Development

Speech is not only an acoustic signal; in fact, it is also multimodal. The boost that we all get from watching someone speak in a noisy situation has been repeatedly validated experimentally (first shown by Sumby & Pollack, 1954 ). Just as watching a talking face facilitates adult perception of speech under noisy conditions, infants are also better able to discriminate speech when it is accompanied (Teinonen, Aslin, Alku, & Csibra, 2008 ) or preceded by (ter Schure, Junge, & Boersma, 2016 ) visual displays of talking faces. Indeed, infants can discriminate languages just on the basis of watching silent talking faces (Weikum et al., 2007 ).

It has been known for some time that young infants are sensitive to the correspondence between heard and seen speech. When presented with two side-by-side images of the same face (one visually articulating, for example, the vowel /i/ and the other the vowel /a/), infants will look preferentially to the face that matches the vowel sound that is played (Kuhl & Meltzoff; 1982 ; Patterson & Werker, 2003 ; see also Bristow et al., 2009 , for similar evidence from event-related potential, or ERP, studies). Young infants are able to detect the auditory and visual (AV) match not only of the speech segments of the native language, but also of nonnative phones that they have never experienced (Pons, Lewkowicz, Soto-Faraco, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2009 ), suggesting that specific experience with the speech sounds in question is not required to establish the AV mapping between heard and seen speech. Nonetheless, experience has an effect on AV speech perception. After 10+ months of age, infants can no longer detect the match between heard and seen speech from a nonnative language (Pons et al., 2009 ).

Multimodal influences on speech perception extend beyond the information seen in talking faces. There is evidence for a role of the infants’ own oral-motor movements on speech perception as well. This was first shown empirically in a study of AV perception of /u/ versus /i/, wherein having a pacifier or teething toy placed in the mouth (yielding a /u/ versus /i/ mouth shape, respectively) changed AV matching of these same two sounds (Yeung & Werker, 2013 ). Researchers have also examined auditory-motor (AM) speech perception, showing an influence even without visual mediation. In one study, neuroimaging using magnetic encephalography (MEG) revealed that motor circuits in the infant brain are activated when listening to speech at 6 months of age, but less so by 10 months, after perceptual attunement (Kuhl et al., 2014 ). Furthermore, having a teething toy in the mouth that interferes with the ability to make a tongue movement reduces 6-month-old infants’ discrimination of a nonnative front (dental /da/) versus back (retroflex /Da/) distinction (Bruderer, Danielson, Kandhadai, & Werker, 2015 ). This work raises the hypothesis that impairments in oral-motor abilities, such as with cleft palate, could put an infant at risk for difficulties in phonetic discrimination and the later-emerging language capabilities that build on phonetic discrimination, such as word learning.

Lexical-Semantics: Word Learning

As infants learn the sounds of their language(s), they are also learning how to connect sounds to meaning. Typically developing children produce their first word at around 12 months of age (Benedict, 1979 ). However, using innovative methods, language researchers have discovered that infants represent and comprehend many of the complexities of words well before then. For example, eye-tracking experiments that record where infants look when they hear common nouns have provided evidence that infants understand a few words by as early as six months (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012 ). Over the past several decades, there have also been crucial discoveries about how infants are able to build up a lexicon so quickly, from zero to thousands of words by the age of four. One of the main questions driving this research asks which aspects of word learning are input-driven, which aspects are guided by biases or constraints, and how these constraints change across development.

Determining What a Word Is

Because we do not pause between words when we speak, one of the first challenges that infants face is parsing the continuous speech stream into individual lexical units. Researchers have discovered that seven- to eight-month-olds learn word boundaries by tracking the transitional probabilities (TPs) between syllables (i.e., the likelihood that one syllable follows another; Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996 ). This type of learning, called statistical learning , is useful for word segmentation because the TP between syllables within a word is higher than between syllables that cross word boundaries. Indeed, not only do young infants discriminate high-TP syllables from low-TP syllables, they are also more likely to (a) use high-TP syllables to categorize objects at eight months (Erickson, Theissen, & Graf Estes, 2014 ) and (b) map high-TP syllables to novel objects at 17 months (Graf Estes et al., 2007 ). In other words, statistical learning helps infants pick out candidate word labels from the speech stream. There is electrophysiological evidence that even newborns track TPs in speech (Teinonen, Fellman, Näätänen, Alku, & Huotilainen, 2009 ), suggesting that this learning mechanism helps segmentation get off the ground. By 9–10 months, however, infants rely more on language-specific cues, such as which phonemes signal word boundaries in their language, and whether their language tends to stress the first or second syllable in bisyllabic words (e.g., Mattys, Jusczyk, Luce, & Morgan, 1999 ). This trajectory shows how phonology and lexical-semantics overlap and also suggests that word segmentation begins as an unconstrained process that becomes tuned to the specific constraints of the surrounding language over the first year of life.

While infants are learning where words begin and end, they are also learning about the internal phonetic structure of words—specifically, which types and combinations of sounds comprise plausible word labels in their language. Infants begin life accepting many sounds as labels, including nonlinguistic sounds such as beeps (Woodward & Hoyne, 1999 ), but they begin to narrow in on language-specific labels by their first birthday (e.g., MacKenzie, Graham, & Curtin, 2011 ; for a review, see Saffran & Graf Estes, 2006 ). The sounds that infants accept as word labels are thus constrained by around the same time that they narrow in on the phonemes of their language, but these constraints, too, are driven by native language input.

Mapping Words to Meaning

Across the first two years of life, infants learn which sounds make up words in their language. How do they then map these words onto meanings? This process is more difficult that just associating a sound with a referent, as demonstrated by the indeterminacy of reference, or the gavagai problem (Quine, 1960 ; see also Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005 ). If a person points to a scene and says “gavagai,” is she referring to a particular object? An action? A property? Quine ( 1960 ) pointed out that there are an indeterminate number of possible referents when you hear a new word for the first time. And yet, infants are surprisingly good at learning word meanings. Carey and Bartlett ( 1978 ) were the first to show that two-year-olds can map a new word onto a new meaning after only one brief exposure.

Since this seminal study, researchers have found that infants can map a novel word to a new object after only one learning session by as young as 13 months (Woodward, Markman, & Fitzsimmons, 1994 ). Researchers agree that word mapping must be primarily driven by input—each language has its own, essentially arbitrary, set of label-referent mappings that must be learned. The indeterminacy of reference problem, though, has led to proposals that constraints must be built in to get word learning off the ground. Markman ( 1990 ) suggested that children come to word learning with a set of linguistic constraints to guide them. For example, when children as young as 18 months hear a novel label, they assume that it refers to a novel object, rather than one whose name they already know (the mutual exclusivity constraint; Halberda, 2003 ). However, bilinguals and trilinguals do not show a robust use of mutual exclusivity at this age (Byers-Heinlein & Werker, 2009 ), and instead are more willing to accept a second label for the same object than are monolingual infants (Kandhadai, Hall, & Werker, 2017 ). These results show that this word-learning constraint is not input-independent, but instead reflects the properties of the word-to-world mappings the child has experienced in her language-learning environment.

In fact, recent evidence suggests that despite the indeterminacy of reference, infants may not need any language-specific constraints to begin learning words. For example, eye-tracking studies have shown that mutual exclusivity may be driven by a domain-general bias to attend to novel objects over familiar ones (Mather & Plunkett, 2009 ). In addition, some theories posit that infants are born with an innate sensitivity to social cues, such as eye-gaze, that guide early learning (Csibra & Gergely, 2009 ), although the origin of these social biases is under debate (Yurovsky & Frank, 2015 ). Another proposed replacement for linguistic constraints is cross-situational word learning, a mechanism by which young infants track the cooccurrence of labels and referents across multiple learning moments. Smith and Yu ( 2008 ) showed that 12-month-old infants are able to use cross-situational statistics to learn new words, and they suggest that this general associative mechanism may be critical early in life, before infants learn more language-specific strategies to map words to objects.

Indeed, during the second and third years of life, toddlers begin to use many language-specific mechanisms to map labels to referents. For example, two- to three-year-olds use learned linguistic cues, such as grammatical morphemes (e.g., -ing or quantifiers and determiners such as some or the ) to determine if a novel word refers to a concrete object, substance, individual, adjective, or verb (Hall, Lee, & Bélanger, 2001 ; Hall, Waxman, & Hurwitz, 1993 ). By two years of age, toddlers also use the syntactic frame around a novel word (such as “The dog is gorp ing the bunny”) to infer the meaning of novel verbs (syntactic bootstrapping; Naigles, 1990 ; see Fisher, Gertner, Scott, & Yuan, 2010 , for a review). Toddlers’ use of linguistic cues is not only a powerful word-learning mechanism, but it also demonstrates the emergence of morphosyntax knowledge (see the subsection “Early Signs of Grammatical Knowledge” ), highlighting the interplay between lexical and syntax acquisition. Finally, two-year-olds use sociopragmatic cues, such as the events or discourse surrounding a novel word (Tomasello & Akhtar, 1995 ), to map novel words to meaning. This wide array of language-specific cues that toddlers use to map words to meaning demonstrates how word learning evolves as infants learn about the properties of their native language(s).

Mapping a label to a specific object, action, or property is one important step in learning a word, but children also have to accurately generalize words to other exemplars. The word ball does not refer to only the first ball an infant sees, but to a set of objects that make up the ball category. Indeed, word learning and conceptual development are intimately connected. For example, word labels and other communicative signals cue three- to six-month-old infants to form a category over visually and taxonomically similar referents (Ferguson & Waxman, 2016 ; Ferry, Hespos, & Waxman, 2010 ). One debate driving this area of research is whether early lexical categories are based on perceptual or conceptual similarity. For instance, during the second year of life, infants extend novel nouns along taxonomic characteristics, such as animacy (Booth, Waxman, & Huang, 2005 ), suggesting that they map novel nouns to conceptual categories even at this early age. However, Smith and colleagues found that toddlers extend novel nouns to objects of the same shape (Landau, Smith, & Jones, 1988 ) and suggest a perceptual account of early lexical categories and generalization (Colunga & Smith, 2005 ).

This debate points to a broader interest in understanding whether word learning is best described as a top-down or bottom-up process. Do infants and toddlers test cognitive models or hypotheses based on evidence in the input (top down), or do they learn words by tracking perceptual and statistical information (bottom up)? For example, some researchers argue that young children form a hypothesis when they encounter a novel word in an ambiguous situation (Trueswell, Nicol Medina, Hafri, & Gleitman, 2013 , Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007 ), while others argue that they use associative learning, spatial grounding, and attention to novelty to build lexical-semantic representations across time (McMurray, Horst, & Samuelson, 2012 ; Smith & Yu, 2008 ). These contrasting theories emerged in the early 21st century , and further investigations into both will enhance our understanding of the mechanisms behind early word learning. Notably, the investigation into the roles of bottom-up versus top-down processes is echoed in the phonemic discrimination literature (see the subsection “Phonemic Development” ), demonstrating similarities in learning processes across language domains.

The Structure of Early Word Knowledge

The past several decades of research on word learning have focused on the constraints and characteristics of the input that allow infants and toddlers to learn individual words. However, researchers have recently begun to explore how children structure their vocabulary knowledge. By two years, or even as early as 18 months of age, toddlers link words with related meanings, such that when they hear one word, such as dog, they activate related words, such as cat or leash (Rämä, Sirri, & Serres, 2013 ). These links help toddlers process words faster and more accurately (Borovsky, Ellis, Evans, & Elman, 2015 ). There is evidence that two-year-olds are able to encode lexical-semantic links during their first exposure to new words (e.g., Wojcik & Saffran, 2013 ), and researchers are continuing to explore the biases that guide the emergence of vocabulary structure.

Infants and young children are word-learning experts who segment, map, generalize, and structure new words without any explicit instruction. And yet, differences in vocabulary size emerge within the second year of life, and these differences are predictive of later academic success (Hart & Risley, 1995 ). What accounts for individual differences in vocabulary size? Weisleder and Fernald ( 2013 ) found that the number of words that 19-month-olds hear predicts both their language-processing speed and vocabulary growth 5 months later. Input quality, such as the number of turn-taking conversational events, has also been found to predict vocabulary size (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015 ).

While basic research in word learning is leading to interventions for children with language delays, researchers are still investigating the fundamental questions that have driven the field for decades. What biases or cognitive constraints do infants bring to the task of learning words? How do these change with experience? These questions also frame research in another domain of language learning: morphosyntax acquisition.

Morphosyntax: Learning Grammar

The term morphosyntax refers to the structural organization of a language. It consists of the set of rules governing the internal structure of the words (the morphology), and the rules determining how words are combined into bigger units such as phrases and sentences (the syntax). These two systems—morphology and syntax—are interdependent and part of the grammar of a language.

Early Signs of Grammatical Knowledge

At around 20–24 months of age, typically developing children start producing multiword utterances, entering initially a “two-word” stage (Guasti, 2002 ). Children’s earliest utterances have been traditionally described as “telegraphic” because they tend to lack grammatical elements such as determiners (e.g., the, a ), prepositions (e.g., in, of ), and auxiliary verbs (e.g., is, has ). These omitted elements are the functors of a language, and they can be words that stand alone (e.g., the, in ), or affixes that are attached (e.g., - ing: walk -ing ). Functors typically have no lexical meaning but signal grammatical relations, building the scaffolding of phrases and sentences, and are extremely frequent elements. Children’s telegraphic speech typically consists of content words such as nouns (e.g., turtle, tea ), verbs (e.g., dance, walk ), and adjectives (e.g., slow, warm ). Contrary to functors, content words have lexical meaning and are much less frequent. By the second half of their third year, children start producing complex sentence types—which include both content words and functors—(e.g., relative clauses: the turtle that walked very slowly …) and fluently use a variety of complex sentence forms by their fourth year.

The telegraphic nature of the children’s first multiword utterances initially led to the proposal that, at the earliest stages of development, language knowledge lacks functors and is limited to content words. Some views attributed this proposed developmental gap to the fact that functors are more abstract and semantically complex than content words (Brown, 1973 ), whereas others claimed that functors were acquired in a later, biologically determined, developmental stage than content words (Radford, 1990 ). However, studies assessing the perceptual abilities of infants have revealed that they build representations of their language’s functors well before they produce their first multiword utterances. Indeed, even newborn babies have been shown to discriminate functors from content words (Shi, Werker & Morgan, 1999 ) due to the differing acoustic properties of these two types of words: functors are typically phonologically minimal elements (that is, they tend to be shorter than content words, have reduced vowels, and simpler syllabic structure). Thus, by 6 to 8 months of age, infants can segment functors from the speech stream (Höhle & Weissenborn, 2003 ; Shi, Marquis, & Gauthier, 2006 )—initially only the most frequent ones (Shi, Cutler, Werker, & Cruickshank, 2006 )—and, by 8 to 11 months of age, they can already use them to segment adjacent content words (Marquis & Shi, 2012 ; Shi & Lepage, 2008 ). Further, 14- to 16-month-olds are aware of the cooccurrence of specific categories of functors and content words. Determiners, for instance, are typically adjacent to nouns, and 14- to 16-month-olds categorize novel words presented with familiar determiners as nouns. Further, they group similar functors into classes and distinguish them from other types of functors (e.g., determiners: the, your . . . from pronouns: I, you . . .; Shi & Melançon, 2010 ).

There is evidence suggesting that the acquisition of other aspects of grammar, such as word order, might also start earlier than previously thought. One-word-stage infants (16- to 18-month-olds) can correctly interpret simple sentences that vary in their word order (e.g., Big Bird is tickling Cookie Monster as opposed to Cookie Monster is tickling Big Bird ; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996 ) and, indeed, the infants’ first-produced multiword utterances tend to follow the word order of the target language (Brown, 1973 ).

Generativist and Usage-Based Approaches to Grammar

The debate about how children acquire grammar has been dominated by two fundamentally opposed approaches that exemplify the innateness versus input debate. The generativist approach posits that biologically predetermined processes drive acquisition, and usage-based approaches claim that acquisition results from input-driven processes. The generativist approach claims that children are born equipped with a universal grammar (UG) —that is, a biologically programmed set of abstract principles (Chomsky, 1980 ). According to this approach, the limited input to which learners are exposed during acquisition does not provide unambiguous evidence of certain abstract principles of grammar. Further, learners rarely receive feedback on the structures that are not possible in the target language. Thus, the child acquires the language’s grammar by linking her innate knowledge (the UG) to the specific properties of the language(s) to which she is exposed. The overgeneralization of rules by young children (e.g., using gived instead of gave ), which involve errors not present in the adult input, is proposed as evidence of the existence of abstract syntactic representations.

Alternatively, usage-based approaches (Tomasello, 2000 ) claim that learners initially have no abstract linguistic knowledge. Instead, children learn simple and concrete items and gradually create more complex and abstract constructions and categories. Thus, the infant’s grammar grows in a piecemeal fashion, changing greatly during development and ultimately converging on the grammar spoken in their language community. Younger children’s failure to produce familiar constructions (e.g., I Verb- ed it ) with novel verbs (e.g., gorp ; target: I gorped it ) when presented in a different construction (e.g., See? Ernie’s gorping Cookie Monster! ), is proposed by this account as evidence for item-specific rather than abstract knowledge of linguistic structures (Tomasello, 2000 ).

In parallel to this debate, an increasing amount of research has focused on how the acquisition of morphosyntax is bootstrapped—that is, what information is leveraged to break into learning.

Semantic and Prosodic Bootstrapping

Several hypotheses have been put forward that aim to explain how the acquisition of morphosyntax is set in motion. All these hypotheses have limitations and hence have been proposed by some accounts as potentially acting in combination rather than being mutually exclusive. The semantic bootstrapping hypothesis (Pinker, 1984 ) claims that the child innately expects a correspondence between semantics (meaning) and syntax that allows her to build syntactic categories and identify features—specific characteristics—and rules of grammar. This hypothesis, generativist in nature, assumes that the child can readily identify basic semantic notions such as “concrete objects” and connect these to their corresponding syntactic categories (e.g., nouns) due to an innate set of linking or mapping rules.

The prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis (Gleitman & Wanner, 1982 ; Morgan & Demuth, 1996 ) claims that the input contains acoustic information—part of the prosody or intonation of the language—that correlates with properties of the grammatical structure, such as the boundaries to syntactic constituents. If sensitive to this acoustic information, infants could divide speech into smaller units such as phrases (i.e., combinations of words: the turtle, in Paris . . .). Chunking speech into phrases might in turn allow infants to detect syntactic regularities and build rudimentary representations of certain syntactic features, such as word order (Morgan & Demuth, 1996 ; Nespor, Guasti, & Christophe, 1996 ). This approach assumes that infants are sensitive to the correlations between prosodic and syntactic structure and use these to parse speech. Indeed, a wealth of evidence shows that infants are highly sensitive to prosodic information from the earliest stages of acquisition (Christophe, Dupoux, Bertoncini, & Mehler, 1994 ; Christophe, Mehler, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001 ). Pauses, changes in pitch, and the lengthening of certain segments typically mark the boundaries of prosodic units such as phrases. Crucially, six- to nine-month-olds can use these prosodic cues to phrases to segment speech and discriminate well-formed phrases from identical sequences that differ in their acoustic/prosodic properties; i.e., that consist of the end of a phrase and the beginning of another (Jusczyk et al., 1992 ; Soderstrom, Seidl, Kemler Nelson, & Jusczyk, 2003 ).

Prosodic information is not only useful for segmenting words and phrases. It can also be leveraged for the complex task of discovering word order. Specifically, the location and realization of prosodic prominence within phrases has been proposed to potentially help infants discover the basic word order of verbs and objects (Christophe, Guasti, Nespor, Dupoux, & van Ooyen, 1997 ; Nespor et al., 2008 ). In languages where the V(erb) typically precedes the O(bject) (VO languages: English, Spanish), the prosodically prominent element in the phrase (the stressed syllable of the content word) is longer than the nonprominent element (the functor; e.g., in the phrase: in Pa ris, pa is longer than in ). In languages where the O(bject) typically precedes the V(erb) (OV languages: Basque, Japanese), the prosodically prominent element within phrases has higher pitch and/or intensity instead (e.g., in the Japanese phrase: Pa ris ni “ Paris to ,” pa has higher pitch and/or intensity then ni ). By seven to eight months of age, monolingual and bilingual infants can use these prosodic contrasts to segment unknown artificial languages (Bernard & Gervain, 2012 ; Gervain & Werker, 2013 ). The greatest limitation of the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis is the fact that some prosodic boundaries do not align with the boundaries of syntactic constituents. Therefore, this mechanism is proposed to work in parallel to other bootstrapping mechanisms, such as distributional learning, discussed next.

Distributional Learning

Distributional or statistical learning is a learning mechanism used by humans to segment the input and extract regularities. It is a domain-general mechanism used to parse speech, as well as nonlinguistic stimuli such as tone streams. It is found across modalities (e.g., with visual stimuli; Fiser & Aslin, 2002 ), and shared with other mammals such as rats. A considerable amount of evidence has shown that infants can compute and use the distribution of the elements in the input to segment speech (see subsection “Determining What a Word Is” ). Prelexical infants can track the transitional probabilities of syllables to segment words (Saffran et al., 1996 ). Crucially, eight-month-olds can also track the differing frequency of occurrence of functors and content words in their linguistic input. The relative order of functors and content words correlates with the basic word order of verbs and objects: in VO languages such as English, functors—frequent elements—typically occur phrase-initially (e.g., in Paris ), whereas in OV languages such as Japanese, functors typically occur phrase-finally (e.g., Paris ni “Paris to” ). Thus, computing the frequency of occurrence and relative order of these elements, in addition to using prosodic information (see subsection “Semantic and Prosodic Bootstrapping” ), might help infants to segment phrases and discover basic word order. Indeed, 8-month-old infants segment unknown artificial languages that contain frequent and infrequent elements according to the relative order of functors and content words characteristic of their native language, and 17-month-olds associate infrequent novel words with content words (Gervain, Nespor, Mazuka, Horie, & Mehler, 2008 , Hochmann, Endress, & Mehler, 2010 ). The role of statistical learning in discovering word order reveals one overlap in the mechanisms for learning words and syntax.

Distributional learning is essential for the acquisition of another crucial aspect of morphosyntax: nonadjacent dependencies. Nonadjacent dependencies are sequentially distant elements that regularly cooccur, such as the relation between an auxiliary verb (e.g., is, as in: is jumping ) and a functor attached to the main verb (e.g., - ing : She is jump ing ). The ability to track such dependencies seems to emerge at around 15–18 months of age; at this age, infants can track nonadjacent dependencies in strings of novel wordlike items (e.g., aXc: pel kicey jic ), where the presence of the first element ( a : pel ) predicts the occurrence of the third ( c: jic ), regardless of the middle element ( X: kicey ; Gómez & Maye, 2005 ). By around 18 months of age, infants have gained knowledge of some of the target language’s nonadjacent dependencies and prefer passages that contain grammatical rather than ungrammatical combinations of functors ( everybody is bak ing bread versus * everybody can bak ing bread ; Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998 ). Further, by 19 months of age, infants start tracking relationships that straddle phrase boundaries, such as the singular/plural distinction in Subject-Verb agreement ( A team bake s versus * A team bake Ø ; Soderstrom, Wexler, & Jusczyk, 2002 ). The development of infants’ ability to track nonadjacent dependencies across the second year of life suggests that distributional learning might bootstrap the learning of complex grammatical structures.

Perceptual Primitives

Finally, in addition to these bootstrapping mechanisms, the acquisition of grammar appears to be guided by what have been defined as perceptual primitives; that is, perceptually salient configurations that are detected automatically by the perceptual system. Humans are attuned to detecting repetition and edges in the language input. Even newborns detect repetition in speech (Gervain, Macagno, et al., 2008 ), and adults can learn repetition-based structures (e.g., ABA, ABB ), but not other structures with similar complexity (e.g., piano tone triplets such as low-high-middle; Endress, Dehaene-Lambertz, & Mehler, 2007 ). Edges, in turn, have been proposed to be highly salient elements that help listeners encode information. Adults learn nonadjacent dependencies and generalize repetition-based structures when these occur at the beginning or end of a sequence, but fail if the same constructions are sequence-internal (Endress & Mehler, 2009 ; Endress, Scholl, & Mehler, 2005 ). Functors typically occur at the edges of phrases, and affixes at the edges of words (Endress & Mehler 2010 ; Gervain, Nespor et al., 2008 ), and mothers tend to place new information at the final edge of utterances. Besides these proposed perceptual primitives, an early bias has been found in the functional role of vowels and consonants: Vowels are used by adults and infants to learn simple rules, whereas consonants are used to extract words from input and distinguish between lexical items (Bonatti, Peña, Nespor, & Mehler, 2005 ; Pons & Toro, 2010 ; Toro, Shukla, Nespor, & Endress, 2008 ).

In sum, a combination of general learning mechanisms, such as distributional learning of the properties of functors and content words, sensitivity to the prosodic structure of speech at the phrase level, and the gradual acquisition of lexical items, might help prelexical infants bootstrap their knowledge of syntactic categories and certain syntactic features. For instance, the cumulative information about word order provided by the correlated prosodic and statistical information might lead infants to discover this major syntactic feature before their first birthday. Importantly, though ample research has shown the important role of visual information in the perception of auditory speech in infancy (see the subsection “Multimodel Influences on Phonemic Development” ), its potential role in the acquisition of grammar remains largely unexplored.

The acquisition of grammar appears thus to be driven by the interplay of different bootstrapping mechanisms, perceptual primitives, and early biases, along with cumulative knowledge. Crucially, the relative weight of these different factors changes throughout the different phases of development, and the potential role of other mechanisms or sources of information, such as visual information, remains to be determined.

When Skinner and Chomsky laid out their theories of language acquisition in the late 1950s, they pitted the role of the environment against the role of innate knowledge—Skinner arguing that language is learned from input, and Chomsky countering that there is an innate language module in the brain. This debate sparked decades of research on the mechanisms that allow humans, and not any other species, to learn a structured communication system without any explicit instruction. The current research suggests an integrated approach by which biases guide what infants learn from the surrounding environment. For example, in the area of phonology, newborns’ bias to attend to speech over other signals may facilitate early learning of the prosodic and phonemic properties of their native language(s). In the area of lexical-semantics, infants’ bias to attend to novelty may aid in mapping new words to their referents. In morphosyntax, infants’ sensitivity to vowels, repetition, and phrase edges may guide statistical learning. In each of these areas, too, there is evidence of new biases coming into play throughout development, as infants gain more knowledge about their native language(s). The current article also highlights how phonology, lexical-semantics, and morphosyntax interact with one another throughout learning. For example, learning the sounds of the native language(s) may guide the learning of word labels (and vice versa), and segmenting word labels is crucial to learning word order.

The field of language acquisition reached an exciting juncture in the early 21st century . The majority of theories began to point to a dynamic integration of the input and perceptual/cognitive biases across development (e.g., Christiansen & Chater, 2016 ). With this integrative view, new questions emerged:

How does hearing more than one language affect emerging biases? In the phonological domain, bilingual infants show differences in speech discrimination development (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 1997 ). In lexical-semantics, bilinguals are more willing to accept a second label for an object category (Kandhadai, Hall & Werker, 2017 ). Further work is needed to explore ways in which a multilingual environment may affect other language-learning mechanisms.

How do visual, motor, and other nonauditory modalities of input influence language learning? There are recent discoveries of the effects of visual and sensory-motor proprioceptive information on infant speech perception (e.g., Bruderer et al., 2015 ). It is likely that in other areas of language acquisition, the traditional focus on auditory input has led to an impoverished understanding of the information available in the environment and how this information guides the development of perceptual biases.

Are the same mechanisms recruited for sign-language and spoken-language acquisition? There is some evidence that language learning is similar across both modalities. For example, infant babbling in sign shows the same complexity and development as babbling in speech (Petitto & Marentette, 1991 ). Further research is needed to not only increase our understanding of language learning in the signing population, but to also reveal how the affordances of visual versus auditory language affect the development of learning constraints.

How do domain-general cognitive processes, such as attention and memory, influence language learning, and how do changes in these processes affect the development of language learning biases? The incorporation of memory development into theories of word learning has led to new discoveries (see Wojcik, 2013 , for a review), but more work is needed.

How do caregivers adjust their interactions with infants over development to bootstrap language learning? Parents respond contingently when infants babble, and this contingent responding helps guide phonological learning (Goldstein & Schwade, 2008 ). It is possible that parents adjust their interactions in other ways to influence language learning, and understanding this adjustment could change how we think about the content of input. Relatedly, investigating what infants see and attend to in a noisy environment will also advance our understanding of input (Smith, Yu, Yoshida, & Fausey, 2015 ).

Each of these future directions will provide a more nuanced understanding of how infants and young children use rich input to learn language, as well as how this learning is affected by the changing biases across development.

Acknowledgments

We thank Padmapriya Kandhadai, Laurel Fais, and Viridiana Benitez for their feedback on previous versions of this paper. This work was supported by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the EU Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (2007–2013) under REA grant agreement no. 624972 awarded to Irene de la Cruz-Pavía, and by a NSERC Discovery Grant (81103), SSHRC Operating Grant (435-2014-0917), and NIH Operating Grant (R21HD079260) to J. Werker.

the acquisition of language: a learning experience

Professor Kim noted that one of the issues in the debate around human language acquisition is that Chomskyan scholars tend to concede individual points to the cognitive-behaviorist paradigm while holding that if only one aspect of Universal Grammar (UG) is valid, then the theory holds water [1] . These generativists understand theories of UG as logically encapsulating and preceding cognitive-behaviorist arguments. If, they argue, it turns out that human brains come pre-programmed to comprehend one particular syntactic rule, then Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition device it implies are valid. However, that framing is infelicitous and patently wrong-headed, because the burden of evidence necessary to disprove it (a repository of information on all languages) is too large and one important tenet of the generativist approach to language acquisition is explainable in terms of a cognitive-behaviorist framework. This essay will explore these problems, ultimately arguing that a cognitive-behaviorist understanding reflects a more feasible and appropriate approach to language acquisition.

Bakhtin writes: “verbal discourse is a social phenomenon – social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning”. (l982:259) Language is social, not only in the Saussurean sense that it belongs to society, but also in that it only works as an interpersonal and dialogic phenomenon. A UG approach disagrees on this point, noting that Language exists in the brain at birth but merely needs to be triggered to activate the supposed Language Acquisition Device (LAD). It is then primarily a psychological phenomenon which has a neurological incipiency. However, Chomsky described the development of the language faculty as “a procedure that operates on experience acquired in an ideal community”. (Cook & Newson, 1995:79) Because it contradicts the assertion that language is stimulus-free, the notion that experience is a crucial element of initial language development destabilizes the feasibility of a specific LAD and blurs the line between generativist thought and cognitive-behaviorist theories.

The rationale which supported Chomsky’s early description of an internal and specifically linguistic faculty for language development was largely provided by a critique of B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist theory. According to Cook and Newson, Skinner argued that “language is determined by stimuli consisting of specific attributes of the situation, by responses the stimuli call up in the organism, and by reinforcing stimuli that are their consequences”. (76) This, for Chomsky, was reprehensibly deterministic. If that were the case, they queried, how do “people regularly understand and produce sentences that they have never heard before”? (77) Such a line of questioning fundamentally misunderstands the role of sociality in the acquisition of language. I would like to suggest a recast of Skinner’s behaviorist approach.

Language is not stimulus-free. Chomsky cleverly (or perhaps just unwittingly) concedes this point. Recall that they included experience in a description of how the LAD functions. Simply put, experience is stimulus. Take the following scene from the Lion King (1994) for example. Rafiki strikes Simba on the head with his staff and when questioned for his reasoning responds “It doesn’t matter, it’s in the past. [The past hurts] but the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it”. When Rafiki moves to strike Simba again, he ducks. Experience (i.e external stimuli) does condition a response. Language is no exception.

In the case of language, we can understand primary linguistic data as stimuli which conditions a response in the uptake of a particular grammar. Chomsky refutes this line of thinking by noting that a child language learner “rarely encounters appropriate external rewards or punishment”. (Cook & Newson, 77) The successfulness of social interactions does in fact constitute a reward system. Misfires (or other types of botched sociolinguistic interaction) thereby are a kind of punishment. These sometimes are explicit ( No, Timmy, foots is not a word; you have to say feet ), but not nearly always. Human infants are attentive to the social intent of speakers in word-learning situation. (Saffran & Thiessen, 2007:75) When young spoken language learners babble, as they come closer to approximating groups of sounds which agree with the phonotactics of their parent’ native language, they are met with cheers. Indeed, from the moment they are born, children are surrounded by language doers who excitedly await and encourage their development of that faculty. Within that frame of understanding, the conclusion seems inescapable that language is learned, in the first instance, through social interaction.

One might argue that this practice is only applicable to communities which engage in child-oriented accommodation during the critical period of language development. Those persons who engage in parent-ese give targeted attention to the early linguistic production of infants, but this practice is not universal. Scholars have used the existence of communities that require linguistic bootstrapping of their babies as evidence for UG and the innate LAD. However, as Tomasello points out, “Generative Grammar was created to describe English,” and several universalistic claims made by generativists around linguistic features such as X-bar phrase structure, subject/object relations, and long range syntactic movement do not pan out for all languages. (1995:136,139) Therefore, it is not enough to argue that because child-oriented accommodation is not universal then UG theory must hold water. UG has to be a suitable description of all languages first in order to serve as an adequate model of language acquisition. The cognitive-behavioral model, however does create a sufficient platform upon which to understand this process.

There is no such thing as language that is not social. Universal Grammar assumes that there might be, a truly impossible claim to prove. Thus, it is not a useful way of thinking through language acquisition. Because there is sociality in every level of language use, the cognitive-behaviorist framework ultimately provides a stronger foundation to understand that systems of social interaction allow language acquisition.

[1] I use the phrases Chomskyan and generativist synonymously in this essay to mean “associated closely with the Universal Grammar concept and the constellation of ideas it implies”.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. Discourse in the novel. In Michael Holquist, ed., The dialogic imagination: four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. C. Emerson & M. Holquist, trans. Austin, Texas: University of Texas

Cook, Vivian, & Newson, Mark. 1995. Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.

Saffran, Jenny, & Thiessen, Erik. 2007. Domain-general learning capacities. In Erick Hoff & Marilyn Shatz, eds., Blackwell Handbook of Language Development. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell.

The Lion King. 1994. Walt Disney Pictures. Dir. Rob Minkoff. [online]

Tomasello, Michael. 1995. Language is not an instinct. Cognitive Development, 10, 131-156.

One Reply to “the acquisition of language: a learning experience”

Hi! To be 100% honest, I chose to read your essay because you cited The Lion King. But I also enjoyed it! I do have some thoughts though.

I agree with the basis that all language is social, but I disagree with some aspects of your theories regarding language acquisition. For example, you say: “The successfulness of social interactions does in fact constitute a reward system. Misfires (or other types of botched sociolinguistic interaction) thereby are a kind of punishment. These sometimes are explicit (No, Timmy, foots is not a word; you have to say feet), but not nearly always.”

However, the “punishments” you describe do not happen often enough to be considered a successful reward system – they definitely do not happen “not nearly always” (?). Parents and teachers occasionally offer correction, whether explicitly as you describe or implicitly (recasts), but sometimes they ignore the incorrect usage or even reinforce it by repeating it because it is “cute.” In addition, explicit correction tends to happen when the meaning of a word used is incorrect, rather than the grammar. (My lack of sources is likely discrediting me – this information comes from my Fall 2016 notes in my Language Acquisition class, also taught by Dr. Kim, and I am having trouble finding the original studies.) Basically: correction can be helpful when present, but it does not happen often enough or consistently enough to have a truly significant effect; i.e. to completely account for the success of language acquisition.

Anyway: I do not believe in Universal Grammar per se, but I do think humans likely have an underlying biological capacity for language. Whether it is rooted in domain-general or domain-specific knowledge, I have yet to firmly decide, though I lean towards a more constructionist view of domain-general abilities that are used for language learning in addition to other knowledge acquisition, while also keeping in mind that experience and input are important. These domain-general capacities include symbolic representation, memory, chunking, probabilistic analysis, etc: all helpful to understanding the world around us, but also likely contributing to successful language acquisition.

Your essay leans towards empiricism, but what do you think about constructionism?

Language Acquisition

Child language acquisition is the process by which infants and children come to speak the language of the community around them. Children must acquire a great deal of linguistic knowledge, including the set of speech sounds in the language they are learning, the ways in which their language combines them (phonetics and phonology), the individual words of their language, the ways these words are used in context, and more. In particular, language acquisition must also include the acquisition of core morphology and syntax (i.e., how languages mark who did what to whom). In very broad terms, there are two answers to the question of how children acquire language, each taking a different view of language. Under generativist accounts, language is a set of formal rules for putting words together; under constructivist accounts, children do not start out with formal rules but begin by storing phrases that they hear around them.

Until the mid 1950s, child language acquisition research consisted mainly of diaries and informal observations of children’s speech. The earliest known example is Dietrich Tiedemann’s 1787 diary of the linguistic development of his (German-speaking) son (see Levelt, 2013 ). Other diaries soon followed, including those by Hippolyte Taine (1876, French), Charles Darwin (1877, English), William Preyer (1882, German), and Clara and William Stern (1907, German).

Although the Sterns also conducted some of the earliest experimental studies of child language acquisition ( Levelt, 2013 ), perhaps the first that remains influential and highly cited to this day is Jean Berko-Gleason’s study of English morphology ( Berko, 1958 ). Morphology is the process by which words change (or morph ) to mark things like singular versus plural (“one cat,” “two cats”) or who is doing the action (e.g., “I read,” “he reads”) [see Morphology ]. In the most famous part of the study, Berko showed children a picture of a novel, made-up creature and said, “This is a wug” (a novel, made-up word). She then showed children a picture with two of these creatures and said, “Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two…”, inviting children to fill in the blank. The headline finding is that children correctly said “wugs.” Indeed, this was true for 97% of children aged five years and over. What is less commonly reported is that, for under-fives, this figure was only 76%. Furthermore, for more complex plurals (e.g., “tasses” or “gutches”), only around 30%–40% of children gave the correct answer regardless of age group.

The findings of Berko (1958) prefigure later debates between generativist and constructivist approaches to children’s acquisition of morphology. The key distinction between these views can be illustrated with a simple example. Under a generativist account, one rule of English says that a determiner (e.g., “a,” “the”) always goes before the relevant noun (e.g., “cat,” “dog”); we say “the cat and the dog,” not “ * dog the” (“*” means that the combination is ungrammatical). Generativist accounts assume that children figure out these rules very early, in some cases before they speak themselves, perhaps with the help of innate knowledge (e.g., knowledge from birth that, generally speaking, determiners are either always before or always after nouns rather than varying randomly). They produce new sentences by analogizing across stored exemplars (e.g., “It’s a cat and a dog , so it must be a dinosaur , not *dinosaur a ”). In contrast, under most constructivist accounts, the adult endpoint is not a set of rules at all, but groups of exemplars (e.g., “a dog,” “a cat,” “a dinosaur”) that support generalizations known as constructions (e.g., a [THING]).

Returning to the findings of Berko (1958) , generativist researchers point to children’s high level of success with some items as evidence that they have learned the general rule (e.g., plural = NOUN + “s”). Constructivist researchers point to between-item differences as evidence for analogy; i.e., that children are more easily able to find a soundalike analogy for “wug” > “wugs” (e.g., “bug” > “bugs,” “hug” > “hugs,” “mug” > “mugs”) than “gutch” > “gutches” (e.g., perhaps only the relatively rare “crutch” > “crutches”).

The development of modern theoretical perspectives (1960 – 1990)

The 1960s saw the development of the precursors of modern generativist and constructivist accounts. Given his development of the general theoretical frameworks that underpin acquisition research in the generativist framework, Noam Chomsky is considered an important figure in child language acquisition research (e.g., Chomsky, 1965 ). Much research in the constructivist framework takes the position that Chomsky’s theoretical frameworks have led the field of language acquisition in the wrong direction (e.g., Tomasello, 2003 ). Either way, it is important to be clear that Chomksy’s contributions to language acquisition—like B.F Skinner’s—are purely theoretical; neither conducted a study of children or the language input they hear.

The 1960s also saw the publication of an influential paper on pivot schemas . Braine (1963) reported the findings of one of the earliest naturalistic corpus studies, in which investigators (typically the child’s parents) try to capture everything the child says in a given period (in those days, generally by keeping handwritten notebooks). Braine reported that at the earliest stages of acquisition, children’s knowledge of language seems to consist of a toolkit of schemas that each combine a fixed word (the pivot) and a kind of slot into which suitable words can be inserted (e.g., “my [THING]”; e.g., “my Mommy,” “my Daddy,” “my milk”) [see Word Learning ]. It was soon recognized that pivot schemas per se are far too coarse and simplistic to capture even early language development, but the analysis is important historically as perhaps the first to formalize a constructivist input-based approach to language acquisition as opposed to a generativist approach based on formal rules.

The 1970s saw the publication of another landmark corpus study ( Brown, 1973 ). Although the (Biblically codenamed) children Adam, Eve, and Sarah were recorded in the early 1960s, the corpus was later computerized and made publicly available and is still used in research today (as part of the CHILDES corpus ). Much of Brown’s focus was on inflectional morphology. A morphological rule (e.g., adding “-s” to a verb referring to “he/she/it”: “she likes cake,” “John likes cake,” “it goes there”) was deemed to have been mastered when a child applied it correctly on 90% of occasions (as opposed to, for example, incorrectly saying “ * John like cake”—a common error by English-speaking children). This analysis prefigured later theoretical debates around exactly why children make these kinds of errors. On a generativist analysis, errors such as “ * He like cake” reflect either a stage in which children treat certain rules as optional (e.g., Wexler, 1998 ), or in which they are trying out different rules before settling on those that apply to their particular language (e.g., Legate & Yang, 2007 ). On a constructivist analysis (e.g., Freudenthal, Gobet, & Pine, 2023 ), these errors do reflect not children’s failure to apply a VERB + “s” rule, but the truncation (shortening) of rote-learned phrases from the input (e.g., “[ Does] he like cake?”) or the fact that forms without the “-s” ending dominate in the language that children hear (e.g., “I like,” “you like,” “they like”…).

Although the 1970s saw occasional studies of the acquisition of languages other than English (e.g., Bowerman, 1973 , Finnish; MacWhinney, 1976 , Hungarian), it was only in the 1980s that researchers began to systematically compare acquisition across multiple languages. Beginning with Slobin and Bever (1982) , a series of studies investigated how children learning different languages come to understand “who did what to whom” in the sentences they hear. English relies strictly on word order: “The dog chased the cat” can mean only that the dog is the chaser and the cat, the one chased. But in languages such as Italian and Serbian/Croatian (among those studied by Slobin and Bever), morphological case markers on nouns mark (for examples like this one) the SUBJECT (chaser) and OBJECT (the one chased), allowing the word order to vary. For example, “The dog + OBJECT chased the + cat + SUBJECT” means “The cat chased the dog” (or something like “As for the dog, the cast chased it”). At least, this is true for adults. For many languages, children misinterpret such sentences by assuming that they follow the more frequent word order of their language (e.g., SUBJECT VERB OBJECT for Serbian/Croatian), effectively ignoring the morphological case markers. The constructivist-oriented competition model (e.g., Bates & MacWhinney, 1989 ) argues that this pattern arises because the word-order cue is present in just about all of the relevant sentences children hear, while case marking is present and informative relatively rarely.

Many generativist accounts of the 1980s also focused on word-order acquisition. For example, the edited book Parameter Setting ( Roeper & Williams, 1987 ) set out several theoretical accounts under which children learn word order by using the language they hear to set innate switches or parameters to the relevant setting for their language (see Snyder, 2021 ). Serbian/Croatian (like English) generally follows SVO word order (e.g., “the girl kicked the ball”), but between them, the world’s languages allow all logically possible word orders (from most to least common, SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV). Under parameter-setting accounts, then, children set (broadly speaking) one switch that determines whether the VERB comes before or after the OBJECT, and another that determines whether the SUBJECT comes before or after the VERB. Pinker (1984) set out an alternative generativist account under which children use innate mappings between semantic and syntax ( linking rules ) to learn word order. For example, children are born knowing the following across languages:

The AGENT (the one doing the action) tends to be the SUBJECT (e.g., “the girl”).

The PATIENT (the person/thing that has the action done to it) tends to be the OBJECT (e.g., “the ball”).

The ACTION (e.g., “kicked”) tends to be the verb.

This means that a child who heard (and understood) “the girl kicked the ball” could read off the word order of her language (here, SVO).

Further methodological and theoretical debate (1990 – present)

Technological developments in the 1990s allowed recordings of adult–child conversations to be computerized and, crucially, automatically searched for whatever linguistic structures were being investigated (e.g., MacWhinney & Snow, 1990 ), leading to a resurgence in naturalistic corpus-based studies. For example, focusing on children’s acquisition of determiners (e.g., “the” and “a”), generativist-oriented researchers argued that corpus data suggest that children have a “the”/“a” + NOUN rule (e.g, “a dog,” “the cat,” “a dinosaur”) from the earliest stages of development (e.g., Valian, 1986 ; Yang, 2013 ), with constructivist researchers arguing that this position is not supported by the data (e.g., Pine & Martindale, 1996 ; Pine, Freudenthal, Krajewski & Gobet, 2013 ). The debate continues into the modern era (e.g., Meylan, Frank, Roy, & Levy, 2017 ), though some accounts (e.g., Ambridge 2020a , 2020b ) have argued that these kinds of data are consistent with both generativist-style early productivity and constructivist-style early rote-learned phrases (e.g., “the” + “cup,” “the” + “ball”).

The 1990s also saw a slew of experimental studies investigating children’s acquisition of basic word order. In general terms, the generativist position (e.g., Wexler, 1998 ) is that children already have the relevant rules (e.g., for English, SVO) from the youngest age at which they can be tested. The constructivist position (e.g., Tomasello, 2000 ) is that children start out with rote-learned phrases (e.g., “I” + “want” + “it”) and slot-and-frame patterns (e.g., “I want [THING]”) and do not acquire the equivalent of a fully general SVO “rule” “in most cases until around the third birthday” ( Tomasello, 2000 , p. 215). In the 1990s, a series of studies used novel, made-up verbs created for the purposes of the experiment (e.g., “meeking” or “taming”) to test the generativist claim of general rules that apply to any verb against the constructivist claim of (amongst other things) individual slot-and-frame patterns for particular verbs (e.g., “he’s eating [THING]” for the verb “eat”). A comprehensive summary of these studies can be found in Ambridge and Lieven (2015) , but, in brief, the pattern is as follows. In production studies, which require children to actually produce new sentences with the novel verbs (e.g., “Big Bird is meeking Cookie Monster”), it is true that children do not generally succeed “until around the third birthday,” except when they have a suitable slot-and-frame pattern into which they can insert the novel verb (e.g., “he’s [ACTION]ing it”; Dodson & Tomasello, 1998 ). A similar pattern is found in act-out studies in which children are given familiar toys and asked to act out, for example, “Big Bird is meeking Cookie Monster” (e.g., Akhtar & Tomasello, 1997 ).

However, children show earlier knowledge of SVO word order in comprehension studies in which they hear (for example) “the duck is meeking the bunny” and have to choose between one screen showing a duck performing a novel action on a bunny and another screen showing a bunny performing a novel action on a duck (by either pointing at, or simply looking at, the matching screen). The “third birthday” claim was finally put to bed in the mid-2000s with studies showing that, although the effect is fragile, children can succeed even before their second birthday ( Gertner, Fisher & Eisengart, 2006 ; Fernandes, Marcus, Di Nubila & Vouloumanos, 2006 ). Taken together with the word-order studies summarized above, these findings suggest the need for a theoretical account of basic word-order acquisition that can accommodate both generativist-style early knowledge of “rules” and constructivist-style early reliance on simple slot-and-frame patterns (e.g., “I’m [ACTION]ing it”).

A similar conclusion can be drawn from the debate around children’s acquisition of questions, which came to the fore in the 2000s. Questions are particularly interesting because (at least in languages such as English) a particular type of word-order error is very common: Children ask, for example, “ * What he is eating?” rather than “What is he eating?” Generativist accounts (e.g., Pozzan and Valian, 2017 ) see such errors in terms of children’s occasional failure to apply a general (possibly innate) rule that starts out with non-question word order (e.g., “he is eating”) and moves the auxiliary verb (“is”) before the SUBJECT (“he”). Constructivist accounts (e.g., McCauley et al., 2021 ) argue that errors such as “ * What he is eating?” instead reflect the use of stored chunks that children have heard in declarative (non-question) sentences (e.g., “He is eating”), which they then combine with a question word (“what”). Again, detailed explanation is still required to elucidate why children seem able to apply a general “rule” in some cases but produce errors in others.

Finally, no historical account of child language acquisition research would be complete without mention of the long-running and (in)famous English past-tense debate (e.g., Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986 ; Prasada & Pinker, 1993 ). Generativist accounts (e.g., Pinker, 1999 ) argue that children show evidence for a default rule (adding “-ed”) that can be applied to any verb (including made-up verbs) regardless of its sound (e.g., “yesterday, I ploamphed”). Constructivist accounts (e.g., Marchman, Wulfeck & Weismer, 1999 ) argue that children show evidence for analogy between similar-sounding words (e.g., the made-up verb “wiss” has the past-tense “wissed” [pronounced “wist”]) by analogy with “miss”–“missed,” “hiss”–“hissed,” and so on. As is often the case, the debate petered out with both sides claiming victory (e.g., Pinker & Ullman, 2002 ; McClelland & Patterson, 2002 ). One thing is clear: This debate, like many of those summarized above, has been hampered by an overreliance on English (e.g., Granlund et al., 2019 ). Any successful account of the acquisition of inflectional morphology, or of language more generally, will have to apply in principle to all the 7,000 or so languages spoken worldwide ( Kidd & Garcia, 2022 ).

Core concepts

It is important to emphasize that the labels adopted here— generativist and constructivist —are necessarily broad and imprecise. Each approach encompasses a wide variety of different individual theories, which often differ importantly in their details. Neither would individual researchers necessarily self-identify as members of one or another theoretical camp (much as musical genres might be helpful for critics and listeners but are often eschewed or even derided by artists themselves). In the same way, each of the core concepts set out here is broadly consistent with one or another general approach but does not necessarily form a key part of any particular theory.

Generativist concepts

Generativist theories generally adopt the assumption of the autonomy of syntax : that “the rules (principles, constraints, etc.) that determine the combinatorial possibilities of the formal elements of a language make no reference to constructs from meaning, discourse, or language use” ( Newmeyer, 2016 ). Of course, syntax must interface with meaning, discourse, and language use, and at least one generativist approach (e.g., Grinstead, 2021 ) argues that childlike errors are not a result of non-adultlike knowledge of grammar (syntax) but of the interface between syntax and discourse/language use. This is an example of the famous generativist distinction between competence and performance (e.g., Chomsky, 1965 ): A child might have fully adultlike knowledge of syntax (perfect competence) but still make childlike errors with language (e.g., “it goed over there”)—that is, imperfect performance—due to other nonlinguistic factors such as memory failure.

Most, perhaps all, generativist accounts are also nativist accounts: “The prevailing opinion among generative grammarians since the 1960s has been that this system (i.e., the system that combines words and phrases into sentences) is not only situated in the human mind, but also that its fundamental principles, its inventory of combinatorial elements, and so on are innate” ( Newmeyer, 2016 ). Precisely what is innate varies from theory to theory, but it is usually, minimally, some grammatical categories such as NOUN and VERB (but not, of course, the individual nouns and verbs of the language to be learned) and some basic rules for combining them into sentences. Some theories remain rather vague about exactly what is innate, but an excellent counterexample to this vagueness is Valian (2014) : “There is good evidence for at least one innate idea – Determiners…It is impossible to have Determiners without having Nouns, because part of the definition of Determiners is that they take Noun Phrases as their complement. Après Determiners, le deluge .”

Chomsky famously coined the terms language acquisition device (LAD) and universal grammar (UG) as metaphors for this innate knowledge possessed by learners of all the world’s languages (i.e., “universal”). One common generativist argument for the necessity of the LAD or UG is the argument from the poverty of the stimulus: the claim that it is not possible to figure out the underlying rules of language simply by hearing examples of sentences generated using those rules. It is important to note that the term language acquisition itself is controversial, as it carries the implication that many crucial aspects of language are not learned—only “acquired”—since they rely on innate knowledge or mature like “the development of a second set of teeth” ( Wexler, 1996 , p. 117): an implication generally disputed by constructivist accounts, which eschew innate linguistic knowledge and emphasize learning.

Constructivist concepts

Constructivist accounts are often called input-based or usage-based accounts because they emphasize the importance of children learning language on the basis of the input (i.e., the language of parents, caregivers, and other adults) and, importantly, by understanding how these adults are using language (e.g., Tomasello, 2003 ). For example, a child might understand that “Do you want some juice?” is a question not because it has certain grammatical properties (i.e., auxiliary-before-subject word order, as discussed above) but because it is produced with a particular intonation and because the parent is holding a cup and an open bottle of juice and raising their eyebrows in the child’s direction. Bruner (1983) famously coined the language acquisition support system as a metaphor for this real-world support, and as a kind of retort or alternative to Chomksy’s LAD.

Constructivist accounts assume that children start out by learning frozen phrases (also known as [rote-learned] fixed phrases or holophrases) such as “I’m kicking it” and “I’m eating it,” each paired with a meaning. Next, children abstract across these frozen phrases via a process known as schematization to form partially productive, lexically specific construction schemas (also known as slot-and-frame patterns) such as “I’m [ACTION]ing it” (e.g., Lieven, Pine & Baldwin, 1997 ). Finally, children abstract across these schemas (or individual stored utterances) to arrive at fully abstract constructions (e.g., [SUBJECT] [VERB] [OBJECT]) that can be used to produce or understand any relevant sentence. Constructivist accounts are not always clear as to whether an abstract construction like [SUBJECT] [VERB] [OBJECT] is actually stored in some sense, or whether a construction is just a kind of shorthand or metaphor for a fuzzy cluster of stored individual utterances ( exemplars ), which speakers generalize across when producing or understanding relevant utterances (e.g., Ambridge 2020a ; 2020b ).

Questions, controversies, and new developments

Open science.

One recent development in the field—as in cognitive science more broadly—has been an increasing adoption of open science [see Open Science ]. These practices attempt to combat what Bishop (2019) calls the “four horsemen of irreproducibility,” referring to the fact that many key findings reported in published papers cannot successfully be reproduced by colleagues:

publication bias, whereby studies that fail to show an expected effect are deemed too uninteresting for publication;

low statistical power, whereby studies are run with low numbers of participants (or few observations per participant), making their results unreliable;

p -hacking, whereby researchers run multiple statistical analyses and report only those that meet a criterion of statistical significance; and

hypothesizing after results are known (HARKing), whereby unexpected (and perhaps supurious) results are retrospectively “predicted” in the Introduction section of the paper (like a would-be sharpshooter firing at a barn at random, then drawing a target around the bullet holes).

In an attempt to rein in the third and fourth horsemen, many researchers now publicly pre-register their hypotheses and analysis plans on websites such as the Open Science Framework , and many journals offer a registered report format by which studies are accepted in principle on the basis of their methods and analysis plans regardless of the eventual results.

One solution to the problem of low statistical power is large, multisite replications. Here, language acquisition research has been a leader of the wider field, especially through the efforts of the ManyBabies Consortium . In an attempt to combat publication bias, a new open science journal, Language Development Research , launched in 2020 with a commitment “to publishing any empirical or theoretical paper that is relevant to the field of language development and that meets our criteria for rigour, without regard to the perceived novelty or importance of the findings.”

Theoretical developments

Turning from methods to theory, recent years have seen the acceleration of an approach that gained traction in the 1980s: implementing theoretical proposals as computational models of language learning [see Bayesian Models of Cognition ]. The advantage of computational models—as opposed to traditional descriptive verbal theories—is that they make precise quantitative predictions that can then be tested against data from child corpora or experiments. For example, the patterning of a particular error made by English-learning children (e.g., saying “ * mouses” instead of “mice”) can be explained by a simple discriminative-learning model in which various meaning-based factors or “cues” (e.g., multiple items, multiple mouse items, mousiness) compete to predict the occurrence of the form “mice” versus “mouses” (Ramscar, Dye, and McCauley, 2013) . While discriminative learning is broadly consistent with a constructivist approach, generativist approaches have also adopted computational modeling as a way of formal theory testing. For example, variational learning approaches (see Pearl, 2021 , for a review) adopt traditional generativist assumptions such as parameter setting and rules for question formation but assume that children implement these parameters or rules gradually and probabilistically on the basis of the input.

Most recently, child language acquisition—like many other fields—has seen its attention captured by large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT [see Large Language Models ]( OpenAI, 2023 ). Interestingly, the field’s response to LLMs has largely split along traditional party lines: Constructivist-oriented researchers (e.g., Piantadosi, 2023 ) argue that LLMs not only simulate many aspects of a constructivist approach to language acquisition, but even—to quote the title of Piantadosi’s controversial paper—“refute Chomsky’s approach to language.” Generativist-oriented researchers (e.g., Kodner, Payne & Heinz, 2023 ) are skeptical precisely because LLMs eschew the symbolic, categorical representations (e.g., VERB, NOUN) that are assumed, under this approach, to characterize language and its acquisition. On this view, as Kodner et al. (2023) put it, “the implications of LLMs for our understanding of the cognitive structures and mechanisms underlying language and its acquisition are like the implications of airplanes for understanding how birds fly.” Either way, with the ever-increasing processing power and flexibility of modern computer systems, what seems certain is that computational modeling—of whatever theoretical stripe—will play an increasingly key role in understanding child language acquisition.

Broader connections

Signed languages (e.g., British Sign Language, American Sign Language) are acquired in more or less the same way as spoken languages (see Lillo-Martin & Henner, 2021 , for a review). Therefore, any successful theory will have to account for the acquisition of spoken and signed languages alike. Language acquisition research also includes children whose acquisition of language is (for want of a better term) “atypical” in some way: particularly the 7%–8% of children with developmental language disorder ( Norbury et al., 2016 ).

As is usual for the field, language acquisition in this entry is defined as the process by which children come to speak their first (or native ) language (or, since bi- or multilingual acquisition is very much included, first languages [plural]). A field that is clearly related, but that has perhaps surprisingly little overlap, investigates how older children or adults learn a second (or third, etc.) language, either via formal instruction (e.g., in school) or immersion (e.g., moving to a country where that language is spoken). Indeed, this area of research is often called language learning specifically to contrast with the field of language acquisition. A large study of almost 700,000 (aspiring) English speakers found that the cut-off point between native language acquisition and foreign language learning is surprisingly late: Given sufficient immersion, learners can acquire native-like accuracy in a foreign language up until around age 17, after which it tails off ( Hartshorne, Tenenbaum & Pinker, 2018 ). The study of language representation and processing in mature adult native speakers is called psycholinguistics [see Psycholinguistics ].

Another field that is clearly related to language acquisition, but that is again perhaps surprisingly distinct, is literacy acquisition (i.e., learning to read and write). The two are linked in that, as you might expect, children who experience difficulty with spoken language early in life often experience difficulties with reading and writing later (e.g., Botting, 2020 ). However, the two are distinct in that while almost all children come to speak the language of those around them (and without explicit instruction), it is only since the 1960s that a majority of children globally have been taught to read and write ( Roser & Ortiz-Ospina, 2016 ).

In summary, although considerable progress has been made in the past two-thirds of a century of systematic research, many questions surrounding child language acquisition remain unanswered. Hopefully, the methodological and theoretical developments summarized here will accelerate the progress of the field towards a more complete understanding of the processes and mechanisms by which children acquire their native language.

Acknowledgments

The support of the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/L008955/1] is gratefully acknowledged.

Acquisition of a language Essay

Acquisition of a language is a situation whereby a person, specifically one who is exposed to the language to be acquired is exposed to that language.

It can either happen in a natural set up where the target language is used and that the learner of this language acquires it by mere exposure to that language (Ellis, 1994), or in a formal set up where the language is to be taught to the learner and he or she is introduced to the rules and ‘tools of trade’ of the language, for instance, when a learner is born in a certain environment, for example an English family, and the language of communication is English, then the learner’s first language is English (Ellis 1985), but when another language comes up such as French, and the child is under circumstance that he or she has to learn French, then French will come in as a second language.

The environments of acquiring both languages will be different and therefore after acquiring the first language, acquisition of the second language can either be simplified or made harder. The second language can either borrow from the first language or not borrow at all; therefore the first language will have played a role either positively or negatively in the second language acquisition process (Gass & Selinker, 2001).

Second language acquisition entails the acquisition of a language after the first language also known as the native language. The first language is considered the language that one acquires first as the mode of communication. This language is always thought to be an individual’s mother tongue.

Any language that comes after the first language is then referred to as the second language, which is essentially the language that opens an individual to the outside world or rather to communicate with people outside his or her native background.

Most often than not, an individual’s background can be traced using the (Gass & Selinker, 2001) accent that he or she has in her foreign language as his or her second language accent can easily contain traces of his or her first language. It is therefore the case that first language can have both positive and negative effects on an individual (Ellis, 1985).

The second language can be easy to learn if there are some similarities between it and the first language. It is always the case that a French speaker can easily learn English as his or her second language because of the few similarities between the two languages, but a speaker of Chinese can find it a bit hard to learn English because there is a wide gap in terms of differences between the two languages (Gass &Selinker, 1992).

There will be more interference experienced (Ellis, 1994) from the Chinese language because of the difference in pronunciation than it will be the case with French.

It is therefore believed that similarities and differences in various languages play a significant role in the acquisition of the second language, the more the differences, the difficult it is to acquire the second language but the less the differences, the more easy it is to learn the second language (Gass & Selinker 2001).

Second language acquisition will be interrupted by the first language in a situation whereby the first language dominates much more in its usage than the second language. Whenever the first language gets more prevalence, then it is most probable that the use of the second language is minimal.

Practice makes perfect and therefore if the language acquired as a second language will find it as a challenge when the learner uses the first language more often because the learner finds it more comfortable to use the first language, then it will be hard reaching the target language.

Therefore the first language will have stood in the way of the learning of the second language and therefore its acquisition hindered. The first language will have stood on the way in the learning of the second language.

Errors can come up in the acquisition of the second language because of the interference caused by the first language (Dulay & Krashen, 1982). Most of these errors are caused by transfer of forms and meanings by a learner from their first language into the second language.

This is evident in practical measures when a learner wants to make it easier to understand a notion that is found in the second language that is almost similar to that found in the native language (Dulay & Krashen, 1982). Most errors are always linked to the first language caused by transfer.

In the acquisition of the second language, the learner either consciously or unconsciously finds himself or herself transferring rules from his or her first language into the second language. These rules May affect the acquisition of the second language either positively or negatively (Dulay & Krashen, 1982)

As propagated by the behaviorist theory that language learning is a process of habit formation (Gass & Selinker, 1992) whereby old habits from the first language are thought to stand in the way of the learning of the new habits found in the second language, this is referred to as negative transfer. This will in the wider picture lead into the formation of errors.

According to behaviorists therefore old habits that will have been formed in the learning of the first language contribute greatly in the learning of the second language and in as much as in the behaviorist context this will lead to formation of errors and it is evident therefore that there is a significant role played by the first language in the learning of the second language.

At times, the habits from the first language help the learning of the second language and make it easier because the contribution of the first language could have been strengthened the values found in the second language, this is called positive transfer. It is therefore true that the first language has a significant role in the learning of the second language.

Second language learners may in some circumstances exhibit habitual avoidance of some constructions in the second language due to the differences exhibited therein from their first language (Beebe, 1998). From their first language, second language learners will tend to concentrate largely on discourse or grammatical forms that do not pose problems with their first language.

Those that show a wide margin of difference will therefore be avoided in order to make it easy for acquisition of the second language, which is as per the learners. But avoidance of these constructions is in the long run attributed to the interferences of the first language.

Avoidance of the constructions that deem hard can affect the acquisition of the second language by the mere fact that the constructions that are avoided can cause major grammatical errors in the acquired language. These errors caused by transfer can seriously harm the acquisition of the second language.

In view of the cognitive approach to second language learning, the learners are thought to creatively use the knowledge that they already have from the first language so as to learn the second language on their own with minimal supervision. This is done by the learners coming up with patterns that are of their own making, making use of the underlying rules they borrow from the first language.

After formulating the rules they then try to fit them in the second language, if they are not relevant they rectify them and if they are applicable then they will have achieved in the learning of the second language. The learners therefore will have learnt from their own mistakes because partly they hold an active role in the learning process.

They will be in a position to learn on their own and acquire firsthand knowledge of the second language courtesy of the first language knowledge they will have had. Rules from their first language will have played a significant role in the general outcome of the second language learning.

The learning processes of both the first language and the second language are always not the same, because the first language always comes first and in a natural setting, the second language comes later and in most cases in a more formal setting but if it occurs in a natural setting the mechanisms used in its learning are not always the same (Sharwood 1994).

Whereas the acquisition of competence in the first language comes at relatively faster rate, those standards of the second language are relatively slow unless it happens in a relatively faster learner.

More often than not, when a learner gets exposed to the second language at a relatively young age, and incase the first language is not in constant use, the first language stands a chance of being dropped along the way because new rules of the new language tend to overshadow those of the first language.

But in case of comparison of both rules and applying them in the acquisition, then it is quite evident that both languages will have complemented each other (Sharwood, 1994).

When looking at the linguistic word order in a language, more often than not the first language affects the second language (Gass & Selinker, 1992). For instance in English, there is the ‘subject-verb-object’ agreement in word order in a grammatically correct sentence but for an English learner it may not be the case that his or her first language could be having this same word order.

In acquiring English as the second language, the learner will find it convenient using the word order of the native language ignoring that of the second language (English). This is always the case when considering the theory of overgeneralization where the second language learner over generalizes, specifically the rules acquired from the first language.

This can be considered as a type of simplification that aids the learner in understanding and acquiring the second language. The first language will have therefore played a significant role in simplifying second language rules. Though this can be seen as interference from the first language, the end result is this will have aided in the understanding and acquisition of the second language by the learner.

Learners of English as a second language, most significantly French learners will in a way change the rhythm in English because their first language, that is French allows. The distortion of the language is mainly caused by use of words that could not be having the meaning they intend to pass across, for instance the misplacement of the word ‘for’ with a word like ‘since’.

An example in a sentence is, “I have been living here for the last four years and instead use “I have been living here since four years”. This is a case of syntactic borrowing from the first language into the acquisition of the second language (Gass &Selinker, 1992)

On the basis of the first language, it is easy to detect areas of the study of the second language that will be of difficulty to the second language learner and those that will not be difficult (Ellis, 1994). The underlying factor is for the second language learner to understand the finer details of the language, so that a line is drawn between the first language and the second language (Gass & Schachter, 1989).

One needs to invent a mechanism that can help avoid the kind of confusion that can arise as a result of errors that arise through overgeneralization and transfer. It is evident that some errors realized in the acquisition of the second language are as a result of the first language influence. Therefore a line needs to be drawn between the rules of the second language and the native language.

Accents are usually carried by the leaner from their fist language into the learning of the second language. In this case, a learner will always tend to pronounce sounds in the second language as if they were in their first language (Gass &Selinker, 1992). This can be seen in languages that share particular words even though the meaning and pronunciation could be different.

This can be seen for example to be in existence among French and English languages. The learners of either of these two languages may find themselves carrying the accents of either of the languages into the other. This will happen if one language comes after the other as a second language.

Therefore borrowing of accent from the first language can always be traced if the native speaker competence of the second language is not achieved (Gass & Selinker, 1992). Thus, this leads to the passing judgment on the origins of an individual through this particular individual’s accents.

In the field of second language acquisition, it is always the case that the learner of the second language achieves the status of being able to communicate with people outside his or her native boundaries of the native language. But at times the second language speaker may find it difficult to get the right words with which to communicate with the speakers of the second language.

This learner will find himself or herself using first language phrases in order to pass a point or rather to say what he or she intended to say (Gass & Selinker, 1992). In most cases this is accompanied by signs and gestures which will aid the listener in understanding what the reader intends to say.

This helps in the expression of oneself in the language that one is well equipped in but with accompaniment of body language, then he or she is well understood. For instance, when one finds it hard to use the word university in the acquired language and has got that word in his or her first language, then with aid of the first language together with facial and other extra linguistic devices, the whole meaning will have been arrived at.

During encoding and decoding of messages, most second language learners find it easy encoding it and giving the messages their own interpretations in their first languages and thereafter find the suitable words to employ in the second language. This is so because before one gives a response, he or she needs to internalize the encoded message after which he or she needs to decode the message.

Apparently before a response is given many processes do take place which in return contributes to the communication cycle to be complete (Gass & Selinker, 1992). The second language in itself cannot be sufficient if the learner has not yet acquired all the vocabularies that aid good communication, before the learner acquires second language competence it is therefore always the case that the first language is helpful.

In case the learner does not get the right vocabulary, then he or she can decode the message in the first language after which it can be given an interpretation that is required in the second language.

The use of the first language, in as much as the initial studies posed as a hindrance to the acquisition of the second language serves as a measure that bridges the gap left by lack of the right words in the second language, but it is this same first language that will serve as a ‘bank’ where borrowing of words takes place to aid encoding and decoding of information for easy communication.

Some linguists view the first language as less important in the acquisition of the second language and that instead of being a positive factor in second language acquisition; the first language seems less important (Beebe, 1998).

If just left aside, as a major factor that contributes positively to the acquisition of the second language, then an individual’s fist language will have been done harm, this will be seen as means of killing the first language after the acquisition of the second language (Gass & Schachter, 1989).

It is therefore wise to see the acquisition of these two languages as complex but equal processes that needs reinforcement in either way. The underlying factor in this case, at all levels and stages of the acquisition of both first and second language acquisition, both of the two languages need each other.

It should be noted that both the first and the second language complement and need each other (Beebe, 1998). Any language of the world plays the role of communication and expressing oneself so as to be understood and to understand other members of society.

The acquisition of a second language in the natural environment of the first language can see the first language being used in making incorrect assumptions concerning the second language but that notwithstanding (Gass & Schachter, 1989), it can be used in making the acquisition of the second language a lot easier.

Both of these two languages need each other in a healthy way in order to strengthen each other, one way nit to make the first language distinct and secondly to make the second language helpful in aiding the first language speakers open up to the outside world of communication

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Language Acquisition and Development

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pp 1718–1721
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Susana Lopez Ornat 2

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First language acquisition ; L1 learning process ; Language development ; Language acquisition

Language acquisition is a process which starts 3 months before birth (Elman et al. 1996 ; Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith 2001 ) and gradually leads to the child’s mastery of his/her native language/s, at around adolescence.

Language learning , language acquisition and language development can be understood as synonymous. However, this lexical differentiation carries interesting theoretical nuances.

Theoretical Background

Why would a child acquire and not learn or develop a language?

The term acquisition reflects the influence of Noam Chomsky, and of nativist (generativist) models inspired by his work, since the late 1950s. The term is rooted in linguistics and emphasizes the notion that grammar is only triggered by the environment rather than learned. It also implies that language development is rather independent of other kinds of development, whether linguistic or otherwise....

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Bavin, E. L. (Ed.). (2009). The Cambridge handbook of child language . New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Chomsky, N. (1972). Language and mind . New York: Harcourt.

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Karmiloff, K., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2001). Pathways to language: From fetus to adolescent . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Dpto. Psicologìa Básica II, Facultad de Psicologìa Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas, Madrid, 28223, Spain

Dr. Susana Lopez Ornat

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Faculty of Economics and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Education, University of Freiburg, 79085, Freiburg, Germany

Norbert M. Seel

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Lopez Ornat, S. (2012). Language Acquisition and Development. In: Seel, N.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_298

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Universal Grammar

Contemporary Research

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Further Reading

Article contents

Introduction

Phonology: Speech Perception and Phonemic Development

Speech Perception and Discrimination

Phonemic Development

Multimodal Influences on Phonemic Development

Lexical-Semantics: Word Learning

Determining What a Word Is

Mapping Words to Meaning

The Structure of Early Word Knowledge

Morphosyntax: Learning Grammar

Early Signs of Grammatical Knowledge

Generativist and Usage-Based Approaches to Grammar

Semantic and Prosodic Bootstrapping

Distributional Learning

Perceptual Primitives

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

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the acquisition of language: a learning experience

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Language Acquisition

The development of modern theoretical perspectives (1960 – 1990)

Further methodological and theoretical debate (1990 – present)

Core concepts

Generativist concepts

Constructivist concepts

Questions, controversies, and new developments

Theoretical developments

Broader connections

Acknowledgments

Further reading

Acquisition of a language Essay

Language Acquisition and Development

Theoretical Background

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