The Role Of The Linguistic Environment

Welcome to our blog, it was created by students from UNAH’s Introduction to Linguistic class led by professor Patricia de Borjas. We were focused in the role of the linguistic, the role of imitation, reinforcement, and analogy; role of structured input to create this blog. We hope you can take a look at it and enjoy, but especially increase your knowledge about this topic.

SUMMARY

The Role of the Linguistic Environment

Children deprived of linguistic input show a clear drive to acquire language and may even create a rudimentary linguistic system, as illustrated by deaf children who create home sign. But there is little doubt that children require a language environment to develop a mature linguistic system. Language was viewed as a kind of verbal behavior, and it was proposed that children learn language through imitation, reinforcement, analogy, and similar processes. On this view the adult input and feedback to the child was paramount.

The Role of imitation, Reinforcement, and Analogy

A common misconception about children acquisition is that children simply listen to what is said around them and imitate the speech they hear. Imitation is involved to some extent of course. An American child hears milk and a Mexican child hear leche and each child attempts to reproduce what he hears. But children’s early words and sentences show that they are not simply imitating adult speech. Many times the words are barely recognizable to an adult and the meaning are also not always like adults. Moreover even when children are trying to imitate what they hear, they are unable to produce sentences outside of the rules of their developing grammar. Also faits to account for the fact that children who are unable to speak for neurological or physiological reasons are able to learn a language spoken to them and understand it. When they overcome their speech impartment, they immediately use the language for speaking.

Another proposal in the behavior tradition is that children learn to produce correct (grammatical) sentences because adults positively reinforce them when they say something grammatical and negatively reinforce them by correction when they say some ungrammatical. It has also been suggested that children put words together to form phrases and sentences by analogy; by hearing a sentence using is as a model to form other sentences. In some sense this must be true. The problem with analogy is that the child must also know when the general rule does not work, as one developmental psycholinguist explain. Children do not make syntactic errors of this sort. They make overgeneralize a morphological rule or omit functional elements. But they seem to know enough about syntactic structure not to assign a uniform analysis to sentences. Reinforcement theory of motivation was proposed by BF Skinner and his associates. It states that individual’s behavior is a function of its consequences. This theory focuses totally on what happens to an individual when he takes some action. Thus, according to Skinner, the external environment of the organization must be designed effectively and positively so as to motivate the employee. This theory is a strong tool for analyzing controlling mechanism for individual’s behavior.

The Role of Structured Input

The linguistic input to language learning is usually thought to consist of simple strings of words. We argue that input must also include information about how words group into syntactic phrases. (sciencedirect)

We suggest that the finding that phrase structure cues are a necessary aspect of language input reflects the limited capacities of human language learners; languages may incorporate structural cues in part to circumvent such limitations and ensure successful acquisition.

Another suggestion is that children are able to learn language because adults speak to them in a special ``simplified`` language sometimes called motherese or more informal baby talk. This hypothesis also places a lot of emphasis on the role of the environment in facilitating language acquisition.

Imitation, reinforcement, and analogy cannot account for language development because they are based on the (implicit or explicit) assumption that what the child acquires is a set of sentences or forms rather than a set of grammatical rules and linguistic structures.

EXAMPLE: In our culture adults typically talk to young children in a special way we tend to speak more slowly and more clearly we may speak in a higher pitch and exaggerate our intonation.