Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: 
IDENTIFYING THE ROOTS OF LANGUAGE 
Anyone who spends even a little time with children will notice the enormous strides 
that they make in language development throughout childhood. However, the rea-
sons for this rapid growth are far from obvious. Psychologists have offered two major 
explanations: one based on learning theory and the other based on innate processes.
 Learning Theory Approaches: Language as a Learned Skill.
The  learning-theory 
approach 
suggests that language acquisition follows the principles of reinforcement 
and conditioning discovered by psychologists who study learning. For example, a 
child who says “mama” receives hugs and praise from her mother, which reinforce 
the behavior of saying “mama” and make its repetition more likely. This view suggests 
that children fi rst learn to speak by being rewarded for making sounds that approxi-
mate speech. Ultimately, through a process of shaping, language becomes more and 
more like adult speech (Skinner, 1957; Ornat & Gallo, 2004). 
In support of the learning-theory approach to language acquisition, the more that 
parents speak to their young children, the more profi cient the children become in 
language use. In addition, by the time they are 3 years old, children who hear higher 
levels of linguistic sophistication in their parents’ speech show a greater rate of 
vocabulary growth, vocabulary use, and even general intellectual achievement than 
do children whose parents’ speech is more simple (Hart & Risley, 1997). 
The learning-theory approach is less successful in explaining how children 
acquire language rules. Children are reinforced not only when they use language 
correctly, but also when they use it incorrectly. For example, parents answer a child’s 
query of “Why the dog won’t eat?” as readily as they do the correctly phrased question,