Theories of Language Acquisition
Nativism
Social Interactionism
Behaviorism
Language development is an innate property in the human brain
Learning is not through development, but through acquiring behaviors
Language is influenced by many factors such as "physical, linguistic, cognitive, and social"
Requires repeated and controlled behaviors
Proposed by Skinner
Entails the breakdown of behaviors into systematic parts, which would be practiced and reinforced
Reinforcement occurred through subsequent rewards and punishments
Thought of reading delays a problem to be "remedied"
The ability to acquire language is "biologically hardwired"
Developed by Chomsky
Babies are not born knowing a particular language, but rather born with the skills to be able to acquire any
Two Principles:
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All babies go through the same stages of language development, no matter the language being learned
Infants learn language much quicker than they should if they were a "blank slate"
Argues that infants make minimal mistakes and know much more about language than any other topic, therefore meaning that they must have been born with a pre-developed notion of language
Language learning is both biological and social
By Alexis LaPlaca
Vygotsky
Bruner
Developed Sociocultural Model, which laid the groundwork for constructivism
Discovery Learning Theory
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Socialization plays a key role in cognitive development
Children learn from a more knowledgeable other
The Zone of Proximal Development is the zone of distance between a child is able to perform a task with help from guidance and the child's ability to solve the problem independently
Proposes that learning occurs through experimentation and drawing on past experiences
Problem based learning
Simulation based learning
Guided discovery
Care based learning
Incidental based learning
Suggests children are more likely to remember knowledge discovered on their own
*Citations submitted in assignment comments