makalah Theories of child language acquisition

Theories of child language acquisition

             Various theories have been proposed to explain how children manage to acquire the adult language. There are those who think that children merely imitate what they hear. Imitation is involced to some extent, of course, but the sentences produced by children show that children are not imitating adult adult speech. From whom would children hear cat stand up table or any of the sentences like these they produce?

A my pencil

Other one pants

Two foot

Moomy get it my ladder

What the boy hit ?

Cowboy did fighting me.

             Even when children are deliberately trying to imitate what they hear they are unable to produce sentences which cannot be generated by their grammar.

Adult :  He’s going out                                                 Child : He go out

Adult :  That’s an old-time train                                    Child:Old-time train

Adult :  Adam, say what I say:                                    

             Where can I put them ?                                    Child: Where I can put them?

          

            Neither can the “imitation” theory account for another important phenomenon. There are children who are unable to speak for neurological or physiological reasons. Yet these children learn language spoken to them and understand what is said. When they overcome their speech impairment they immediately become able to use the language for speaking.

            Another equally untenable theory of language acquisition suggests that children learn to produce “correct” sentences because they are positively reinforced when they say something wrong. This view assumes that children are being constantly corrected for using “bad grammar” and patted on the head when they use “good grammar”. Even it this happened (and it seldom does ), how do children learns from such adult responses what it is they are doing right or wrong ? This view does not tell us how children construct the correct rules. Whatever “correction” takes place is based more on the content of the message thatn on its form. That is , if a child says “Nobody don’t like me,”the mother may say  “Everybody like you.”

            Besides, all attempts to “correct” a child’s language are doomed to failure. Children don’t know what they are doing wrong and are even unable to make the corrections when they are pointed out to them , as is shown in the following examples:

1)      child :    Nobody don’t like me

Mother: No, say “Nobody likes me.”

Child :   Nobody don’t like me

(Dialogue repeated eight time)

2)      Child:    Want other one spoon, daddy

Father:   you mean, you want  “the other spoon”?

Child:    yes, I want other one spoon , please, daddy.

Father:  can you say “the other spoon”?

Child:    other….. one…..spoon.

Father:   say…..”other.”

Child:    other.

Father:   spoon

Child:    spoon

Father:   other…. Spoon
child:     other….spoon. Now give me other one spoon?

Such conversations between parents and children do not take place very often. Mother and father (unless they are linguists) are too busy to correct their children’s speech. Besides, they are usually delighted that their young children are talking at all and consider every utterance to be a gem. The “mistakes” children make are “cute” and repeate endlessly to anyone who will listen.

The “reinforcement” theory fails along with the “imitation” theory. Neither of these views accounts for the fact that children are constructing their own rules. Different rules govern the construction of sentences as the grammar is learned. Consider , for example, the increasing complexity of  one child’s negative sentences. At first the child simply added a no (or some negative morpheme) at the end of a sentence:

            No heavy

No singing song

No want stand head

No fraser drink all tea

No the sun shining

He didn’t hear such sentences. This is a simple way to transform a declare live into a negative. At some point he began to insert a no or can’t or don’t inside the sentence.

            He no bite you

            I no taste them

            That no fish school

            I can’t catch you

             All children  do not show the same delelopment as the child described above , but  they all show similarly regular changes. One child studied by the linguist Carol lord first differentiated affirmative from negative sentences by pitch: her negative sentences were all produced with a much higher pitch. When she began to use a negative  morpheme, the picth remained high but then the intonation became normal as the negative syntactic markers “took over.”  

Nama           : Abdul Rajab 102304819

                     : Abdul Munir 102304833

                     : Malikussabar 062301581

Moderator  : Muktar

References

§  Fromkin Rodman Collins Blair: “An Introductin To Language”.