The Three Theories

I, by far, found the most interesting pieces of information in this week's readings to be the 3 different theories of language acquistion introduced to us in Chapter 1 of Lightbrown and Spada.

Behaviorism
Linguistics have defined this theory of learning as language acquistion comes to us through observation and imitation. In other words, children hear what others are saying around them, then imitate those words, sounds, and sometimes actions.

For example, many people always say that you must not say certain words around small children, for they will pick them up  and then use them in public without actually understanding the degree to which these words affect our social world. That means no cuss words.

I can't say for sure whether or not I entirely agree with the behaviorist theory. I understand that a lot of language acquistion is through what our parents teach us and through observation and listening. But what accounts for error correction, and being able to decipher if a sentence has be stated grammatically correct or not? Is it because we have heard people talking correctly (because not all people do), or is it for some other reason?

Noam Chomsky: The innatist perspective
Noam Chomsky believed that, in order to acquire language, it simply had to be available, and the rest would be taken care of. Before I get too far into describing it, I would just like to pose a question. Isn't that sort of the same thing as behaviorism? Behaviorism requires that there are people around nurturing the child's language. Doesn't this sort of fall under the same umbrella?

Chomsky came up with the notion of Universal Grammar. The chapter did not go very in depth, but from what I can gather is that we, as human beings, have the capacity to learn every language out there; we simply have to access it. Simple? Not so much.

The Critical Hypothesis Period
Researchers have hypothesized that we must acquire language before a certain period in our life, otherwise it will be hardly attainable. I happen to agree with this statement. From what I know, especially the story of Genie, I can see that human interaction is both crucial and necessary. While she was able to learn more aobut language, she never fully developed to her maximum capabilities. It's heartbreaking to hear her story but at the same time all very interesting.