Child Language Theorists Research

Child Language Theorists

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky believes that children are born with the inherited ability to learn any human language. He claims that certain linguistic structures which children use so accurately must be already imprinted on the child’s mind. Chomsky believes that every child has a ‘language acquisition device’ or LAD which encodes the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children have then only to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures from the LAD to form sentences. Chomsky points out that a child could not possibly learn a language through imitation alone because the language spoken around them is highly irregular – adult’s speech is often broken up and even sometimes ungrammatical.

Bruner

According to Bruner, the child’s cognitive structures mature with age as a result of which the child can think and organize material in increasingly complex ways. Children are also seen as naturally inquisitive, thirsty for knowledge and understanding.  The child naturally adapts to its environment and abstract thinking develops through action. Bruner believes the child has to learn for itself by making sense of its own environment.  In fact Bruner could be seen as an ‘extreme constructivist’ since he believes the World we experience is a product of our mind.  What we perceive and think of as our World is constructed through our mind as a product of symbolic processes. 

Skinner

The main principle of operant conditioning, as defined by Skinner is positive and negative reinforcement. Reinforcement is the process in which a behaviour is strengthened, and thus, more likely to happen again. Positive Reinforcement is making behaviour stronger by following the behaviour with a pleasant stimulus. Skinner would say that a child learns language through positive reinforcement! His basic explanation for the development of speech was that parents tend to reward infant vocalisations (such as babbling) by giving the infant attention. This increases the frequency of vocalisation. He would suggest that the child will not progress from babbling to language unless the parent’s shape the child’s language behaviour.

Piaget

From his research into children's language and thinking, Jean Piaget based his theory on the idea that children do not think like adults. Piaget's theory describes the mental structures or "schemas" of children as they develop from infants to adults. He concluded that through their interactions with their environment, children actively construct their own understanding of the world. Piaget's theory purports that children's language reflects the development of their logical thinking and reasoning skills in "periods" or stages, with each period having a specific name and age reference.