3.3 Theoretical Perspectives Theorists at one extreme of the issue contend that language is a learned behavior and that language learning is no different from any other kind of human learning. Theo- rists at the other extreme take the position that not much learning is required, that language is wholly instinctive. Neither extreme is reasonable, but in between the two are a number of competing theories about how it is that a preschool child has a tacit under- standing of how the grammar of his language works that would take a linguist hundreds of pages to describe. We cannot describe all the theories that have evolved or the cases that have been made for them, but we will examine four broad categories of theory related to language that have had a major influence. They are behaviorist, active construction of a grammar, neural con- nectionism, and social interaction. Behaviorist Theories As appealing as behaviorism was in the early part of the 20th century, it has little credence as a theory of language acquisition. Basically, behaviorist theories take the position that children learn through imitation. They listen to the speech around them, imitate what they hear, and then through a system of reinforcement (i.e., being praised or rewarded for correct utterances and having errors ignored or corrected), they learn to discard their imperfect imitations. The problems with applying this theory to real children learning language are obvi- ous. First, children produce utterances they have never heard and, second, adults rarely respond to the form of the utterance. No theory of imitation can account for this and simi- lar utterances. See Chomsky’s Case Against Behaviorism for more on this topic. CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives The most serious flaw of imitation as a theory is that it cannot account for how children come to produce or understand novel utterances, whether in the way they pronounce words or in the way they inflect them, or in the sentences they produce. Pronunciation errors are generally attributed to children’s immature articulators (i.e., their physical inability to produce an exact replica of the adult form). Chloe’s lalo for yellow would be assumed to be caused by her articulators not being sufficiently well developed to produce two distinct consonants and two distinct vowels in the same word. Other kinds of errors are more problematic. It is highly unlikely that Chloe ever heard anyone say, “Nana, you forgotted.” Yet she and all children her age regularly produce sen- tences they could not have heard from anyone else. Even if behaviorism could account for how these forms are created, the theory stumbles on the notion of reinforcement. There is overwhelming evidence that, in general, adults neither negatively reinforce flawed utter- ances nor positively reinforce correct ones. When I responded to Chloe with, “Yes, I sup- pose I did forget,” although I modeled the correct form, my response was to her mean- ing, not her .

1. 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives Theorists at one extreme of the
issue contend that language is a learned behavior and that
language learning is no different from any other kind of human
learning. Theo- rists at the other extreme take the position that
not much learning is required, that language is wholly
instinctive. Neither extreme is reasonable, but in between the
two are a number of competing theories about how it is that a
preschool child has a tacit under- standing of how the grammar
of his language works that would take a linguist hundreds of
pages to describe.
We cannot describe all the theories that have evolved or the
cases that have been made for them, but we will examine four
broad categories of theory related to language that have had a
major influence. They are behaviorist, active construction of a
grammar, neural con- nectionism, and social interaction.
Behaviorist Theories As appealing as behaviorism was in the
early part of the 20th century, it has little credence as a theory
of language acquisition. Basically, behaviorist theories take the
position that children learn through imitation. They listen to the
speech around them, imitate what they hear, and then through a
system of reinforcement (i.e., being praised or rewarded for
correct utterances and having errors ignored or corrected), they
learn to discard their imperfect imitations. The problems with
applying this theory to real children learning language are obvi-
ous. First, children produce utterances they have never heard
and, second, adults rarely respond to the form of the utterance.
No theory of imitation can account for this and simi- lar
utterances. See Chomsky’s Case Against Behaviorism for more
on this topic.
CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives
The most serious flaw of imitation as a theory is that it cannot
account for how children come to produce or understand novel
utterances, whether in the way they pronounce words or in the
way they inflect them, or in the sentences they produce.

2. Pronunciation errors are generally attributed to children’s
immature articulators (i.e., their physical inability to produce an
exact replica of the adult form). Chloe’s lalo for yellow would
be assumed to be caused by her articulators not being
sufficiently well developed to produce two distinct consonants
and two distinct vowels in the same word.
Other kinds of errors are more problematic. It is highly unlikely
that Chloe ever heard anyone say, “Nana, you forgotted.” Yet
she and all children her age regularly produce sen- tences they
could not have heard from anyone else. Even if behaviorism
could account for how these forms are created, the theory
stumbles on the notion of reinforcement. There is overwhelming
evidence that, in general, adults neither negatively reinforce
flawed utter- ances nor positively reinforce correct ones. When
I responded to Chloe with, “Yes, I sup- pose I did forget,”
although I modeled the correct form, my response was to her
mean- ing, not her imperfect syntax. This type of response is
typical of adult-child interactions: Adults focus on the meaning
that the child is trying to make, and any correction is geared
toward helping to make that meaning clear rather than to correct
the form. More impor- tantly, even if I had (foolishly!) tried to
correct Chloe’s syntax, and if she had understood what I was
trying to do, it would not have effected any change in her
language. Children attend to meaning.
Chomsky’s Case Against Behaviorism Noam Chomsky pointed
out the many problems with behaviorism in his 1959 review of
Skinner’s Verbal Behav- ior. Although Chomsky’s criticism
spoke to first language acquisition, the argument holds for
second. Chomsky argued that behaviorism cannot account for
the various facts of language acquisition, namely: • Young
children acquire language at a remarkable speed. • Children are
largely impervious to correction of form. • By the time most
children are 4 or 5, they have an almost limitless capacity to
understand and produce sentences they have never heard before.
• The notion that reinforcement accounts for learning runs
counter to experience—a child does not utter the word dog over

3. and over in the presence of adults who reinforce that behavior.
Chomsky speculated that the abilities that account for all of
these facts are largely innate, part of the cognitive endow- ment
children have at birth. Chomsky, N. (1959). Review of verbal
behavior. Language, 35, pp. 26–58. Skinner, B. F. (1957).
Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Noam Chomsky is an American philosopher, political activist,
and linguist. In the 1960s and 1970s, he made an influential
case for the existence of a language instinct.
Associated Press
CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives
The Active Construction of a Grammar Theory Active
construction of a grammar theory contends that children use the
speech they hear around them to construct the rules of the
language by listening for and discovering pat- terns,
hypothesizing about the rules that create those patterns, and
then testing those rules in their own usage. They are, in a way,
“little linguists.” Certainly, there are data which would appear
to support such a theory. In the sentence Nana, you forgotted,
Chloe had clearly detected that past tense is formed by adding
an -ed. Other words that she used at this time give strong
indication of the rule that she had created:
Learning Grammatical Morphemes In a longitudinal study of
three children, Roger Brown (1973) revealed compelling data
showing that the order in which children acquired grammatical
morphemes in English was very consistent. Even allowing for
slight individual variations, the results showed that children
acquired 14 common morphemes in the following order: 1.
Present progressive -ing 2. Preposition in 3. Preposition on 4.
Plural -s 5. Irregular past, e.g., went 6. Possessive -’s 7.
Uncontractible copula be 8. Articles a, the 9. Regular past -ed
10. 3rd person regular -s 11. 3rd person irregular, e.g., has 12.
Uncontractible auxiliary be 13. Contractible copula be (It’s
Mommy) 14. Contractible auxiliary be (He’s eating.)
Later, de Villiers and de Villiers replicated the study with 21
English-speaking children, and the order they obtained

4. correlated very highly with the children in Brown’s study:
There is a consensus that this research has uncovered a crucial
property of first lan- guage development, namely that the
acquisition of a number of grammatical features follows an
order that is largely the same across individuals. A plausible
inference from this insight is that the underlying mechanisms
determining this developmental order are identical across
individuals and largely unaffected by external influences.
(Meisel, 2011, p. 64)
Another compelling kind of evidence against behaviorism is the
observation that children learning the same language tend to do
so in remarkably similar ways. There is strong evidence, for
example, that children acquire certain of the grammatical
morphemes of English in a largely invariant order, as we see in
Learning Grammatical Morphemes.
CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives
Sarah holded my doll.
She gived it to me.
I ated all my lunch.
(Chloe 4 years, 6 months)
With forgotted and ated, she had doubled up on her past tense,
probably because she did not realize that the verbs were already
in the past tense, or perhaps because she had heard the past
tenses more often than the present. Eventually, she will discover
that her forms do not match the language used by others around
her, and she will refine her rules and try again. Chloe’s
utterances were governed by her own grammar, which differs in
significant ways but also shares important characteristics with
adult grammar. Through the testing, modification, and editing
of her rules, she will progress gradually, as a linguist does when
constructing the rules of an unfamiliar language, until she
achieves the same set of rules underlying adult speech.
Children’s language errors present no difficulty for the active
construction of a grammar theory. In fact, those who hold this
theory do not even see the imperfect forms as errors, but rather
as developmental forms, those language forms, differing notably

5. from adult forms, that children produce as they learn the
language. They are seen as evidence that children’s learning is
rule governed, as exemplars of rules in progress rather than as
errors to be eradicated.
Connectionist Theories Connectionist theories hold that
children learn language through neural connections in the brain,
developing these connections by being exposed to and using
languages.
Proponents of connectionist theories would concede that rules
are useful for describing the language forms that children
produce during the acquisition process, but they would also
argue that children play no active role in actually creating those
forms. These theo- rists recognize that children bring some
significant degree of innate capacity to the task of language
learning and would also concede that eventually children’s
language is rule governed. Connectionists argue, however, that
in the process of acquisition, children are not little linguists
working out rules in their heads, but are more like little
statisticians, computing probabilities and building neural
connections in the brain based on their expo- sure to and use of
language. With increased exposure, the connections are
strengthened. (See Figure 3.1.)
CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives
Each brain cell, or neuron, has a sending fiber or axon (right),
which is coated in myelin, and a receiving fiber, or dendrite
(left). These neuron connections are the basis for connectionist
theory.
Source: Hemera/Thinkstock
Two kinds of language learning are often cited in support of
connectionist theories. One is how children learn what a word
is. The second is their learning of the past tense. How does a
connectionist believe a child learns what a word is? In a
continuous stream of speech in which there are no overt
demarcations between words, how is it that children learn where
the word boundaries are? More specifically, how do children,
hearing, “Once upon a time in a land far away, a little boy and a

6. little girl lived in a cottage at the edge of the woods,” come to
know which parts of that string constitute words? Over time,
they will hear parts of that utterance in other contexts—perhaps
in a sentence such as, “What is that little boy doing?” or “She
couldn’t find her little boy anywhere.” Based on the evi- dence,
they might conclude that littleboy is a word, but hearing little
and boy separately in other contexts over time, they eventually
create a mental representation for little and boy separately.
Remember Chloe’s question, “Are we going to your ami today?”
She had segmented Miami as my and ami, and according to this
theory, she would have done so based on the statistical
probability that whatever came after my was another word. In
this instance, she was wrong, but connectionists hold that this
was not because she had formed the right rule and applied it in
the wrong context but that she had not yet had enough
experience with Miami in other contexts to form the correct
representation (i.e., the place where her nana lived).
Figure 3.1: A neuron
CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives
Connectionists also use children’s acquisition of the past tense
to explain their theory of language acquisition. When children
produce blowed as the past tense of blow, these theorists argue
it is because they have calculated it to be the most likely past
tense based on other words the child has heard, such as mowed,
flowed, and glowed. The connection- ists may be right, but how
do they account for the fact that some children will produce
bringed as the past tense of bring while others will produce
brang? If children are actively constructing rules, the theory
would predict that they would produce bringed and later learn
that there is an exception, brought. If, however, they are
working from a probability or statistical basis, the theory would
predict that they might produce either form—brang, analogous
with rang and sang, or bringed because they had heard other
regular past tense forms. In other words, connectionism would
predict that some children will get it right and others get it
wrong, and this appears to be the case, at least at first. Chloe’s

7. forgotted might be evidence that exposure, or frequency of
occurrence, plays a role. She had heard forgot often enough to
internalize it as a verb form but had not yet recognized it as a
past tense, so she added a regular verb ending because that is
the form she had heard on so many other verbs. In fact, it would
fit the pattern of spot/spotted, dot/dotted, or plot/plotted. Before
any of these rules can be learned, children must first learn
words. Let us consider how Sarah learned baby from this
theoretical perspective.
One of Sarah’s first words was baby. How did she learn it?
According to this theory, she would have heard people using the
word baby in several different contexts—female infants, male
infants, infants wearing snowsuits, pictures of infants, dolls,
and even in reference to herself. Through multiple exposures to
the word, she formed neural connec- tions of various kinds—to
the word itself, to a mother holding an infant, to pictures, dolls,
or possibly just the letter /b/ or people without much hair.
Eventually, these connections would coalesce into her mental
representation of the word baby. These connections are not all
of the same strength, or so the theory goes. If she heard the
word baby used more fre- quently in reference to a doll than to
a human baby or other referents, then the connection between
baby and doll would be stronger than the connection between
baby and any other possible referent. If, however, she had heard
the word used more often with reference to a human baby, she
might well develop a neural connection between baby and
human infants (see Figure 3.2).
CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives
According to connectionist theory, this is how Sarah would
learn the word baby.
Source: Thinkstock
Social Interaction Theory Social interaction theory purports that
children have an innate predisposition to acquire language and
that they develop their own rules. This belief is shared with the
active con- struction of a grammar theory. These theorists also
believe that children acquire language as a result of interaction

8. with more mature speakers of the language (i.e., older children
and adults). On the face of it, this would seem to be obvious and
self-explanatory. In fact, these theorists believe that children
take a very active role by cuing “their parents to sup- ply them
with the appropriate language they need” (Wilson & Mihalicek,
2011, p. 320). This is a truly interactive theory. On the one
hand, children need the social environment to improve their
linguistic and social skills, and on the other, the language-rich
environment exists in large part because it is prompted by
children. Social interactionists have observed that the speech
older speakers use with children is specifically created to be
more learn- able. They may have a point. Consider the
following pair of utterances:
Figure 3.2: Example of connectionist theory
Hears: Baby
Sees
Creates Mental Representation
CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives
a. See the choo-choo? Look at how big it is! It’s going really
fast, isn’t it?
b. There is in our immediate vicinity a locomotive, which,
despite its impressive size, is traveling at great speed.
Few, if any, adults would use sentence (b) when speaking with
an infant. Most people instinctively adjust their speech to what
they perceive to be an appropriate level for a young child to
understand. This adaptation is called child-directed speech
(CDS). CDS has distinct characteristics:
• Different rhythm and pitch. The speech typically has a
sing-song quality, and the speaker’s pitch is usually higher. •
Simplified vocabulary. Rarely would we use choo-choo,
doggie, or potty with adult speakers. • Shorter sentences. The
difference between utterances (a) and (b) illustrate this
distinction well. • Simplified structure. Shorter sentences
usually have simpler structure than long ones. Again, the
difference between (a) and (b) demonstrates this principle. •
Particularly helpful responses. Adults are more tolerant of

9. and likely to respond to infantile utterances that are barely
comprehensible, if at all. For example, when Sarah referred to
herself as Ah-Ah, simplifying the sound structure, adults did not
say, “Who?” or “Whom are you talking about?” Nor did they try
to explain to her that she really should be using “I” to refer to
herself and not the third person. Instead, they acknowledged the
meaning of her utterance and even began to refer to her in the
same way.
Apparently, adults use CDS for two reasons, neither of which is
that they are consciously attempting to teach their children
language. One is to maximize the likelihood of mean- ingful
communication, and the other is to express affection, which
might explain why peo- ple tend to use similar speech when
talking to their pets (Apel & Masterson, 2009).
There are three problems with social interaction theory: The
first is that nobody is certain about how long children need to
be exposed to CDS. The sec- ond is that they do eventually
understand and use compli- cated sentences such as the one in
the previous example; and the third is that CDS may be a cul-
tural phenomenon—we do not know whether it is universal,
although there is evidence from German, Mandarin, Russian,
All kinds of social interaction help children to learn language.
This coach adapts her language to help her young players
understand.
Larry Williams Associates/Corbis