1. THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
WHAT IS A THEORY
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary a theory is
1-A set of properly argued ideas intended to explain facts and events.
2-Ideas, beliefs or claims about something which may or may not be found true in practice.
According to the definition of Longman’s Dictionary Of Contemporary English, a theory is
1-An idea or a set of ideas that is intended to explain something about life or the world especially that has
not yet been proved to be true.
2-An idea that someone thinks is true but for which they have no prove.
WHAT IS LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
1-Acquisition is a process whereby children become speakers of their native language.
2-Acquisition is a process by which language capabilities of a person increases.
APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Various theories and approaches have been emerged over the years to study and analyze the process of
language acquisition. According to the arguments presented by Allan Paivio Len Begg }Psychology of
Language, p-222}, there exists three main school of ideas regarding language acquisition
1-Behavioural approaches to language acquisition
2-Linguistic approaches to language acquisition
3-Cognitive approaches to language acquisition
LINGUISTICS AND PSYCHOLOGY
Until non for most linguists the main aim of their discipline was providing structural analysis of a body of
language data. And to be truly scientific in their approach they dealt with the substance of language in
isolation from any sociological or psychological factors that might effect its use .Although they had been
interested in the processes involved in using language but they believed it to be the function of the
psychologists and not the linguists to investigate. They tended to adopt fairly uncritically whatever the
psychologists proposed
But in recent years many linguists have retained this point of view that the true task of a linguist should be
not the description of individual languages but
1 the explanation of language use.
1 This in turn demands research into human capacity for language
2 And this involves the incorporation of psychology into linguistics.
So today’s linguists say
1-Linguistics is a branch of psychology or
2-Psychology is a branch of linguistics since language is central to all human activities.
The main areas of psycholinguistics is language acquisition
1-How do children acquire their mother tongue
2-The way people learn foreign language
3-The relationship between words and thoughts

2. PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
According to Wilkins}Linguistics in Language Teaching] there exists two highly contrasting general
accounts of language acquisition
1-Behaviourism
2-Mentalism
BEHAVIORISM
IS BEHAVIOUR WHAT
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary behavior is
1-One,s attitude or manner
2-Some act or function in a particular situation
WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE
According to Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary Behavioral Science is
The study of human behavior
Since linguistics is also included in behavioral sciences, it purpose as well is the study of language with
respect to human behavior
WHAT IS BEHAVIORISM
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary, Behaviorism is
1-the theory that all human behavior is learnt to fit in with external conditions and is not influenced by
people’s thoughts and feelings.
According to the definition of Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Behaviorism is
2-The belief the scientific study of the mind should be based only on people’s behavior, not on what they
say about their thoughts and feelings.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO BEHAVIORISM
In 1913, in one of the most famous lectures in the history of psychology, John Broadus Watson (1878-
1958), a 35-year-old "animal behavior man" from Johns Hopkins University, called for a radical revision of
the scope and method of psychological research.
"Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its
theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its
methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves
to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal
response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its
refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation."
Introspection was to be abandoned in favor of the study of behavior. Behavior was to be evaluated in its own
right, independent of its relationship to any consciousness that might exist. The concept of "consciousness"
was to be rejected as an interpretive standard and eschewed as an explanatory device. As an objective,
natural science, psychology was to make no sharp distinction between human and animal behavior; and its
goal was to develop principles by which behavior could be predicted and controlled.
Published in the Psychological Review shortly after its delivery and incorporated within the first chapter of
Watson's 1914 Behavior: A Textbook of Comparative Psychology, this lecture eventually came to be known
as the "behaviorist manifesto." Generations of psychologists, reared in a post-Watsonian discipline that
defined itself as the "science of behavior," were taught that Watson was the father of behaviorism and that
February 24, 1913 was the day on which modern behaviorism was born.

3. Yet behaviorism did eventually spread throughout American psychology. During the 1920s, across the work
of a growing number of psychologists, there emerged a reasonably coherent set of intellectual commitments
to which the name "behaviorism" gradually became attached. Based on the rejection of mentalism in
psychological theory, a dedication to the use of objective methodology in research, and a strong concern
with practical application of psychological knowledge to the prediction and control of behavior,
"behaviorism" in the 1920s owed an obvious debt to Watson.
A RICHER VERSION OF BEHAVIORISM
At the same time, however, behaviorism grew during this period in part by diverging from and transcending
Watson. Influenced by broader conceptions of objectivism and of psychological process developing at
Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Missouri, Ohio State, Minnesota, North Carolina, and even Hopkins,
behaviorism had become, by the end of the 1920s, a more thoroughly elaborated, theoretically more varied
and sophisticated approach than anything to be found in Watson's own writings. It was this richer version of
behaviorism, rather than Watsonianism , that succeeded in transforming American psychology; and it did so
not by converting the old guard but by capturing the enthusiasm of the young. As succeeding generations of
psychologists entered the discipline, objectivism gradually became the norm; and by the mid-1930s,
American psychology had become the science of behavior, and behaviorism, methodological and/or
theoretical, had become its dominant orientation.
DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO BEHAVIORISM
Even among those who identified themselves as "behaviorists," agreement on the program was by no means
unanimous. Early behaviorism took a variety of forms]. There was---
1 the radical behaviorism of Watson, a view notable for its extreme anti-mentalism, its radical
reduction of thinking to implicit response, and, especially after 1916, its heavy and somewhat
simplistic theoretical reliance on conditioned reactions.
2 There was the relational behaviorism of the Harvard group, developed by Edwin Bissell Holt (1873-
1946). Conceiving of behavior as "a course of action which the living body executes or is prepared
to execute with regard to some object or fact of its environment," Holt's behaviorism was molar,
purposive and focused on the relationship between high-level behavioral mechanisms in the
organism and the concrete realities of the social and physical environment.
3 Closely related to this view was a kind of philosophical behaviorism, espoused primarily by
philosophers and tied to pragmatism, in which "consciousness" was defined as a form of behavior
guided by future results.]
4- Albert Paul Weiss (1879-1931) was developing a bio-social behaviorism based on a radical
distinction between the level of theoretical discourse appropriate to behavior analyzed as social cause (i.e.,
"biosocially") and that appropriate to behavior analyzed as sensorimotor effect (i.e., "biophysically").
5-At Minnesota, Karl Spencer Lashley (1890-1958) was arguing a physiological behaviorism in which
the physiological analysis of behavior could be considered "a complete and adequate account of all the
phenomena of consciousness."
6- At the University of Chicago, George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), who had been on the faculty since
Watson was a graduate student, was elaborating a social behaviorism of mind, meaning, self, language, and
thinking that emphasized the social character of behavior and the behavioral character of mind.
7- Finally, in a number of institutions, a sort of eclectic behaviorism was emerging-a behaviorism that
assimilated whatever seemed strongest and most reliable in the views of others.
PSYCHOLOGY FOR BEHAVIORISTS
As a natural science, psychology takes the study of behavior as its fundamental task. Whatever else
psychology might be, for early behaviorism it was fundamentally the science of behavior, where behavior
was defined in terms of the organism's organized response to stimulation. Depending on the theorist and the

4. reaction system in question, response might be overt or covert, implicit or explicit, clear and well-defined or
vague and obscure, molecular or molar, simple or complex. Response might consist of an actual act or
simply of the adoption of an attitude, tendency, or set; it might be controlled by the proximal stimulus or
directed toward objects in the environment. But however otherwise conceived, for the behaviorist, response
involved the operation of effector systems-muscles and glands. Behavior had to do with "how, when, and
why a man does this or that, acts thus and so, desires, seeks, accepts, rejects-in a word, moves."
ADJUSTMEMT AND MALADJUSTMENT
. In the 1920s, behaviorists were united in the assumption that behavior results when the organism's
relationship to the environment must be changed if it is to survive and prosper. Behaviorism referred to such
states as "maladjustments". Maladjustment is a natural byproduct of change in the organism (e.g., an
increase in drive level) or in the environment (e.g., a rise in ambient air temperature); and behavior, which is
a process of adjustment, consists of responses on the part of the organism that tend to restore balance in its
relationship to the environment.
POLYGENETIC CONTINUITY
. For early behaviorism, animal and human behavior exist in an "unbroken continuity," Animals and humans
share both mechanisms and fundamental forms of overt adjustment to the environment. This view, which
originated with Watson's desire to place the study of animal behavior high on the psychological research
agenda, was reinforced by psychology's early success in extending trial-and-error and conditioning analyses
from animals to humans. As Dashiell summarized the continuity commitment: "The genus and species
Homo sapiens is moved by the same forces without and within as are the lower animal forms, and expresses
them in the same general types of actions and action-tendencies. The differences are differences in degree..."
THE DETERMINATION OF BEHAVIOR/
STIMULUS RESPONSE PSYCHOLOGY.
Behavior, from a behaviorist point of view, is a joint function of stimulating conditions in the environment
and characteristics (drive states, hereditary reflexes, acquired systems of habit, emotions, mechanisms of
implicit stimulation) within the organism. In its earliest formulations, this commitment, from which
behaviorism later became known as "stimulus-response" or "S-R" psychology, was somewhat too simply
phrased. Thus, for example, in 1919, Watson said only that: "In each adjustment there is always both a
response or-act and a stimulus or situation which call] out that response....the stimulus is always provided
by the environment, external to the body, or by the movements of man's own muscles and the secretions of
his glands...[and] responses always follow relatively immediately upon the presentation or incidence of the
stimulus."
THE CLASSIFICATION OF BEHAVIOR
. Although many behaviorists pointed to the indissociability of response types in actual behavior, early
behaviorism remained wedded to the classification of response in terms of three major categories: a)
somatic/hereditary (pre-potent reflexes, instinctive reaction tendencies); b) somatic/acquired (systems of
habits); or c) visceral/hereditary and acquired (emotions). Responses in all three categories were then further
classified as explicit, implicit, or preparatory (attitudinal).
Distinctions between instinctive, habitual, and emotional reaction systems were delineated by Watson in
1919. "Human action as a whole," he wrote. "can be divided into hereditary...(emotional and instinctive),
and acquired modes of response (habit)."For Watson, all three response modes were "pattern reactions,"
complex systems of reflexes that function in an organized fashion when the organism is confronted with an
appropriate stimulus.

5. BEHAVIORAL REDEFINITION OF THE TRADITIONAL CATEGORIES OF MENTALISM
. At the heart of early behaviorism lay a commitment to the notion that mentalistic categories and concepts
(e.g., perception, attention, meaning, symbol, memory, purpose, abstraction, generalization, thought) must
either be redefined in terms of behavioral mechanisms or discarded altogether. In 1913, Watson excluded
mind in its entirety from behaviorism. Not only was consciousness rejected as both fact and concept, but
associated mental terms were to be discarded as well. This was the most extreme version of this
commitment; and other early behaviorists did not, as a rule, follow Watson down this path. By far the most
common approach was to redefine the standard concepts of mental analysis in strictly behavioral terms. A
few examples will suffice.
"Perceiving," for Dashiell, was an "anticipatory set (largely implicit) that orients...[the organism] for a
certain line of conduct with reference to...[the] situation." "Meaning" was "the pattern of reaction-tendencies
awakened by...[the thing perceived.]" For Allport, a "symbol" was "a brief and labile response usually
undetected in outward behavior, but capable of being substituted for overt responses." "Consciousness," in
Weiss's terms, was "only the functioning of obscure contractile elements, which in turn stimulate adjacent
receptors that release the verbal overt response..." And "thinking," in that famous analysis of Watson, simply
meant "subvocal talking, general body language habits, bodily sets or attitudes which are not easily
observable without instrumentation or experimental aid."
ANIMAL MODELS
. Behaviorism emphasized the identification of fundamental mechanisms in animal behavior (e.g., trial and
error learning, conditioning) and use of such mechanisms, without significant theoretical revision, in the
explanation of human behavior. This approach, which followed directly from the commitment to
phylogenetic continuity, was largely unquestioned among early behaviorists. Indeed, as behavioral research
began to develop in the late 1920's and 1930's, many of the most important studies focused on animals and
many core theoretical concepts came to be defined almost entirely in terms of the procedures of animal
behavior research.
HABIT FORMATION
. An emphasis on habit formation defined in terms of mechanisms of trial-and-error elaboration of response
and conditioned stimulus substitution was probably the characteristic with which early behaviorism was
most closely associated. Behaviorism in the 1920's was first, last, and always a psychology of habit
formation. Acquired behavior, no matter how complex-thinking, talking, even scientific activity itself-could,
in the final analysis, be reduced to habit.
TRIAL AND ERROR MECHANISM
The trial-and-error mechanism (increase in random movement upon confrontation with a problem situation,
accidental success when chance response alters the organism or the environment in the direction of greater
adjustment, and gradual, mechanical selection and reinforcement of successful movement) was usually
employed to explain efferent modification, the elaboration of the response itself. The conditioned reaction
was typically evoked to explain afferent modification-change in the effectiveness of stimuli, including those
that are purely social and symbolic, in eliciting a given response.
LANGUAGE
. For behaviorists in the 1920's, self-stimulation and response was intimately linked to language. For both
the self in thinking and the social listener in communication, language responses were conceived as
substitute, symbolic stimuli, independent of the sensory attributes of the original stimulus. In this role, they
subserved the related functions of abstraction and generalization. As Weiss , who pioneered this analysis,
asserted:

6. "...many different receptor patterns representative of many different sensory situations and relations, are
connected to the same language response and through this common path the individual may react in a
specific manner to all the objects, situations, and relations thus concerned, even though there is very little
sensory similarity between them."
CONCLUSION
Psychology defined as the natural science of behavior, wedded to objectivism in method and theory and to a
goal of behavioral prediction and control; behavior, animal or human, conceived as a pattern of adjustment
(innate and acquired, skeletal and visceral, explicit and implicit) functionally dependent upon stimulus
conditions in the environment and factors of habit and drive in the organism; emphasis in research and
theory on animal behavior, ontogenesis, drive reduction, habit formation, social behavior, and language-this
was the orientation that began, following World War I, to capture the imagination of young psychologists
and to spread within American psychology throughout the 1920's. This was behaviorism in its early form.
SOME COMMON APPROACHES TO BEHAVIORISM
Conditioned reflexes---------------------------Ivan Pavlov
Experimental method------------------------John B. .Watson
Operant conditioning-----------------------B.F.Skinner
CONDITIONED REFLEXES/CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Pavlov a Russian Scientist made the discovery that led to the real beginning of behaviorism. Pavlov and
most of his contemporaries saw classical conditioning as learning that comes from exposing an organism to
association of environment events.
THE PAVLOVIAN EXPERIMENT
While studying digestive reflexes in dogs, Pavlov found out that it could reliably be predicted that the dogs
would salivate when food was placed in the mouth through a reflex called the salivary reflex in digestion.
Yet he soon realized that after some time salivary reflex occurs even before the food was offered. Because
of the sound of the door and the sight of the attendant carrying the food. The dogs had transferred the reflex
to these repeated actions.
Thus the dogs learnt a new behavior. It was maintained by the behaviorists that language as well is a sort of
behavior that can be acquired in ideal social conditions. According to them language is essentially the
product of the society.
OPERANT CONDITIONING
Behaviorist theory takes language acquisition as a process of habit-formation through stimuli-response
model, as represented in Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957):
1) The child imitates the sounds and patterns which he hears from around him.
2) People recognize the child’s attempts as being similar to the adult models
and reinforce (reward) the sounds, by approval or some other desirable reaction.
3) In order to obtain more of these rewards, the child repeats the sounds and patterns, so that these become
habits.
4) In this way the child’s verbal behavior is conditioned (or ‘shaped’) until the habits coincide with the
adult models.
Thus children learn language in the following steps
IMITATION

7. REPETITION
MEMORIZATION
CONTROLLED DRILLING
REINFORCEMENT
1-IMITATION AND REINFORCEMENT
Children just imitate what they hear. Parents teach them by telling them when they make
mistakes.Children start out as clean slates and through the process of imitation they get linguistic habits
printed on these slates. So we can say that language acquisition is a process of experience.
2-CONDITIONED RESPONSE/STIMULUS RESPONSE PROCESS
The operant conditioning proposed by skinner is based upon four elements
Stimulus------Response---------Reinforcement----------Repetition
The hunger or loneliness ----------------------------------------------Stimulus
The baby cries-----------------------------------------------------------Response
The mother comforts him----------------------------------------------Reinforcement
The same process happens again--------------------------------------Repetition
The baby cries whenever hungry---------------------------------------New behavior
CHOMSKYS EXPERIMENTATION
Chomsky performed some experiments on rats
THE VALIDITY OF BEHAVIORISM
CRITIQUE
1-Behaviourist accounts of L2 acquisition emphasize only what can be directly observed (input) and
ignore what goes on in the ‘black box’ of the learner’s mind, viewing the learner as merely ‘a language
producing machine’. There was little room for any active processing by the learner. Its learning model is
demonstrated as:
A {input} Reinforcement A{Output}
But this model fails to reflect the true picture of children’s L2 acquisition in which the output is different
from the input:
A (input) Reinforcement A+ (output)
A+ is the multiplication resulted from the process of ‘A’ in the black box. If the child’s linguistic output
does not match the input, the explanation must lie in the internal processing that has taken place, something
that induced the Mantalists to go to another extreme of innatist
.

8. 2-Irregular Grammatical patterns
Behaviorism does not explain how children learn to handle irregular grammatical patterns
3-Languaoge a matter of maturation rather than imitation
Children seem unable to imitate exactly the adults grammatical structure at the beginning. They learn these
structures with the passage of time no matter how much parents try to teach them. Thus language is a matter
of maturation rather than imitation.
4-The most dramatic evidence against behaviorism is the fact that the children who can not speak at all but
who can hear normally acquire normal competence in language comprehension.
5-Several kinds of evident suggest that imitation , in the sense of a child’s attempt to reproduce the adults
actual utterances he hear does not play an important role in the acquisition of syntax.
5-One of the relatively empirical problem is that relatively few experiments have been done with infants and
that these have typically dealt with general effects on vocalization.
6-According to Chomsky arguments man is superior to animals with respect to language acquisition so we
can never apply the rules and principles to language learning which are derived from the experiments on
animal.
7-For Chomsky the acquisition of incredibly complex language by children can not simply be explained by
imitation. It definitely has something to do with innate capabilities
CONCLUSION
The above two theories can not give satisfactory answers to SLA, because each goes to a polar extreme.
The debate between behaviourism and mentalism arises the theory of cognitivism, which agrees with the
mentalists that children must make use of innate knowledge, but disagrees about its nature. Cognitivism, on
one hand admits the active processing by the learner, and on the other hand attaches much importance to the
input and the interaction between internal and external factors.