Учебное пособие предназначено для студентов высших учебных заведений, обучающихся по образовательной программе
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| Mother: Would you like some bread and peanut butter?
Child: Some bread and peanut butter. Children imitate, but it must be stressed that very few children imitate much, the rate of imitation of some children may be less than ten per cent. Unlike a parrot that imitates the familiar and continues to repeat the same things again and again, children’s imitation is selective and based on what they are currently learning. But imitation and practice do not account for how children learn all aspects of their native language. The behaviourist explanations for language acquisition offer a reasonable way of understanding how children learn some of the regular and routine aspects of language. However, their acquisition of the more complex grammatical structures of the language requires a different sort of explanation. There are considered some of the proposals for going beyond the behaviourist view. b) The innatist position. Innatism is a theory that human beings are born with same basic knowledge about languages in general that makes it possible to learn the specific language of the environment. The linguist Noam Chomsky claims that children are biologically programmed for language and that language develops in the child in just the same way that other biological functions develop. For example, every child will learn to walk as long as adequate nourishment and reasonable freedom of movement are provided. The child does not have to be taught; most children learn to walk at about the same time; and walking is essentially the same in all normal human beings. For Chomsky, language acquisition is very similar to the development of walking. This is known as the innatist position. According to Chomsky, children’s minds are not blank slates to be filled merely by imitating language they hear in the environment. Instead he claims that children are born with a special ability to discover for themselves the rules of a language system. This ability is based on the child’s innate possession of UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR. UG is considered to consist of a set of principles which are common to all languages. The child is able to discover the structure of the language to be learnt by matching the innate knowledge of basic grammatical relationships to the structures of the particular language in the environment. 11 Here is a summary of the kinds of evidence which have been used to support Chomsky’s innatist position: 1. Virtually all children successfully learn their native language at a time in life when they would not be expected to learn anything else so complicated. 2. Children achieve different levels of vocabulary, creativity, social grace and so on, but virtually all achieve mastery of the structure of the language spoken around them. 3. The language children are exposed to, does not contain examples of all the information which they eventually know. 4. Animals cannot learn to manipulate a symbol system as complicated the natural language of a three- or four- year-old child. 5. Children seem to accomplish the complex task of language acquisition without having someone consistently point out to them which of the sentences they hear and produce are “correct” and which are “ungrammatical”. Chomsky’s ideas are compatible with those of biologist Eric Lenneberg who also compares learning to talk with learning to walk: “Children who for medical reasons cannot move about when infants may soon stand and walk if their problems are corrected at the age of a year or so”. Similarly, children who can hear but who cannot speak can learn language, understanding even complex sentences. Lenneberg observed that this ability to develop normal behaviors and knowledge does not continue indefinitely. He argued that the language acquisition device works successfully only when it is stimulated at the right time – a time which is called the “critical period”. This notion that there is a specific and limited time period for language acquisition is referred to as the critical period hypothesis (CPH). There are two versions of the CPH. The strong version is that children must acquire their first language by puberty or they will never be able to learn it. The weak version is that language learning will be more difficult and incomplete after puberty. The researchers conclude that their study supports the hypothesis that there is a critical period for first language acquisition. c) The interactionist position. A third theoretical position focuses on the role of the linguistic environment in interaction with the child’s innate capacities in language development. Interactionism is a theory that language acquisition is based both on learners’ innate abilities and on opportunities to engage in conversations in which other speakers modify their speech to match the learners’ communication requirements. The interactionists' position is that language develops as a result of the complex interplay between the human characteristics of the child and the environment in which the child develops. The interactionists claim that language which is modified to suit the capability of the learner is a crucial element in the language acquisition process. This distinct speech, directed to children, is known as “caretaker talk”. We are all familiar with the way adults typically modify the way they speak when addressing little children. In English caretaker talk involves a slower rate of speech, higher pitch, more varied intonation, shorter, simpler sentence patterns, frequent repetition, and paraphrase. Adults often repeat the content of a child’s utterance, but they do so with a grammatically correct sentence. |