Whether language is partly due to nature or wholly due to learning or nurture is often referred to as the nature-nurture controversy. Environmentalists vs nativists
CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Pavlov’s dogs
Food (unconditioned stimulus)
Salivation (unconditioned response)
Light or sound (conditioned stimulus)
Watson’s Albert
Sound (uncoditioned stimulus)
Crying (unonditioned response)
Animals (conditioned stimulus)
Environmentalists
the behaviouristic position is that children come to the world with a tabula rasa a clean slate bearing no preconceived notions about the world or about language and these children are then shaped by the environment, slowly conditioned through various schedules of reinforcement
the quality and quantity of the language which the child hears
the consistency of reinforcement offered by others in the environment, should have an effect on the child’s success in language learning
A behaviourist might consider effective language behaviour to be the production of correct responses to stimuli. If a particular response is reinforced, it becomes habitual or conditioned.
The behaviourists view imitation (word for word repetition of all or part of someone else’s utterance) and practice (repetitive manipulation of form) as primary processes in language development.
Skinner’s claim to understand language was based on his work with rats and pigeons. He proved that rats and pigeons could be trained to perform a variety of seemingly complex tasks, provided two basic principles were followed:
the tasks must be broken down into a number of carefully graded steps;
the animals must be repeatedly rewarded.
The type of ‘trial-and-error’ learning is called operant conditioning by Skinner, which can be translated as ‘training by means of voluntary responses’(the word ‘operant’ means a voluntary response rather than an automatic one). Skinner suggests that it is by means of this mechanism that all human learning takes place, including language learning.
An operant is conditioned so that it occurs regularly, and then through discrimination training it is attached to its appropriate stimulus.
Nativists
The hereditarians, who favoured nature, claimed all psychological traits were transmitted directly through the genes from generation to generation. Environment was of little consequence.
Children come into this world with very specific innate knowledge, knowledge that includes not only general predispositions and tendencies but also knowledge of language and of the world.
In 1957 B.F. Skinner published his book
Verbal Behaviour
The book claimed to ‘explain’ language as a set of habits gradually built up over years. According to Skinner, all that is necessary is the systematic observation of the events in the external world which prompt the speaker to utter sounds.
The linguist Noam Chomsky in 1959 wrote a devastating and witty review of a book written by B.F.Skinner A Response to Verbal Behaviour.
In practice, the matter is far from simple, as Chomsky points out. Chomsky makes two major criticisms of Skinner’s work:
the behaviour of rats in boxes is irrelevant to human language
Skinner fundamentally misunderstands the nature of language.
Is there only one sentence possible to be uttered in a particular situation?
Children very often talk to themselves when there is no chance for any reinforcement
Parents tend to approve statements which are true rather than those which are grammatically correct.
Language is infinitely more complex and less predictable than Skinner’s theory would suggest. The behaviouristic theory does not account for the abstract nature of language.
The term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that language acquisition is innately determined.
Chomsky points some of the special properties of language in his review of Skinner’s book. One point which he stresses is that
1) language makes use of structure-dependent operations. By this he means that the composition and production of utterances is not merely a question of stringing together sequences of words. Every sentence has an inaudible internal structure which must be understood by the learner.
Pat has hurt herself. Has Pat hurt herself?
‘In order to form a question, scan the sentence for the word has and bring it to the front’.
The man who has run away shouting was attacked by a wasp.
*Has the man who run away shouting was attacked by a wasp?
The alligator has escaped. Has the alligator escaped?
‘In order to form a question, bring the third word to the front’.
Dogs are funny. *Funny dogs are?
Chomsky suggests that humans may have an innate knowledge of the properties of language. Listeners impose a structure on what they hear for which there is often no physical evidence.
In order to catch his train George drove furiously to the station. (Who was driving?)
The reporters assigned to George drove furiously to the station. (Who was driving)
Another point which was made by Chomsky (1959) is that 2) simple slot-filling operations are inadequate as explanations to language.
Sentences such as these indicate that merely filling a grammatical frame may be only part of what is happening when we speak.
Deep level Surface level
I have hurt I. I have hurt myself.
Deep level
You wash you
Intermediate level
You wash yourself
Surface level
Wash yourself
You will it down
You will sit down, won’t you
Sit down, won’t you
‘the logical problem of language acquisition’
Why do children produce the language they could not have heard in the input?
Because language ability is innate.
Creativity is another fundamental aspect of language which is stressed by Chomsky.
humans have the ability to understand and produce novel, e.g. Giraffe under in walks gorilla the
Chomsky also uses ‘creativity’ in a second subsidiary sense to mean that utterances are not controlled by external happenings; e.g. the appearance of a daffodil does not force a human to say ‘Daffodil’ – he can say whatever he likes: ‘What a lovely colour’, ‘It’s spring, I must remember to clean my car’ or ‘Why do flowers always give me hay fever?’
Chomsky’s belief that humans are genetically imprinted with knowledge about language is referred to as ‘the innateness hypothesis’.
The environment makes a basic contribution – the availability of people who speak to the child. The child, or rather the child’s biological endowment will do the rest. This is known as the innatist position.
Innateness
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.
Children successfully master the basic structure of their native language or dialect in a variety of conditions: some which would be expected to enhance language development (for example, caring, attentive parents who focus on the child’s language), and some which might be expected to inhibit it (for example abusing or rejecting parents).
The language children are exposed to does not contain examples of all the information which they eventually know.
Animals – even primates receiving intensive training from humans – cannot learn to manipulate a symbol system as complicated as the natural language of a three- or four-year-old human child.
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’.
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