Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

David McNeill labeled this inborn tendency the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). He believed that the LAD is a prewiring of the human nervous system that suits it to learn grammar. And described LAD as consisting of four innate linguistic properties:

• - the ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment,

• - the ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can later be refined,

• - knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds are not, and

• - the ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing lin­guistic system so as to construct the simplest possible system out of the available linguistic input.

Chomsky’s Universal Grammar Theory

• Neurological system in human brains that supports language acquisition. “ Language Acquisition Device ” or LAD.

Children are exposed to infinite data and given data LAD produce a finite set of grammar rules.

Noam Chomsky’s L-A-D

Chomsky’s theory of the LAD (Language Acquisition Device) states that every human is born with innate principles of language.

Children learn language spontaneously and speak creatively.

The “poverty of the stimulus theory” states that what children hear is incomplete and often ungrammatical, and cannot account for the creativity of their utterances.

Noam Chomsky’s outlook

Noam Chomsky believes that LAD gives children the capacity to learn the transformational (rules) grammar for turning ideas into sentences. Children also acquire transformational rules that allow them to produce negative forms of the statement: at first, perhaps, “Mommy not sit”, and later “Mommy is not sitting down”: question forms “Is mommy sitting down? ”, and etc.

Functional Approaches

According to this position children learn to function in a language chiefly through interaction and discourse.

In all aspects of our daily life, language plays an important function. Halliday has suggested the following seven functions:

• instrumental function (“I want” function)
• regulatory function (“do that” function)
• interpersonal function (‘me & you’ function)
• personal function.
• imaginative function (‘let’s pretend’, or poetic, function of language.)
• informative function (‘I’ve got smth. to tell you function
• Heuristic function (‘tell me why’ function)

Cognitive Approach (views)

Cognitive views of language development focus on the relationships between cognitive development and language development. Cognitive theorists tend to hold a number of assumptions. Two of the most basic are:

1. Language development is made possible by cognitive analytical abilities;
2. Children are active agents in language learning. Children’s motivation for learning syntax and vocabulary grows out of their “desire to express meanings that conceptual development makes available to them ”

The Cognitive Approach (Piaget)

• Children can only use certain linguistic structures when they understand fully the concepts surrounding them

A child can not use comparison of size if he/she does not understand

the concept of size. Can focus on only one aspect or dimension

of problems.

Example - row of 5 blocks and a row of 7 blocks can count the blocks

in each row and can tell number contained in each. But can’t tell which

is longer?

• Progressive reorganization resulting from maturation and experience.

• Based on discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover, they modify it.

• Sensorimotor stage (0-2 yrs):

Trial and error learning.

Behaviors become goal directed.

Object permanence.

• Preoperational stage (2-7 yrs): mentally represent objects and events.

egocentric thoughts and communications.

unable to focus on more than one concepts simultaneously.

Interactionist theories