Video transcript
So this might surprise you, butone of the most amazing feats you'll ever accomplish as ahuman being already happened, and that is languagedevelopment. I mean, think about it. When you're a baby, all thesesounds are coming at you, and somehow, you'reable to figure out which sounds are words,where there are breaks between the words,general grammatical rules, and you're able toapply them without any real formal training. This is amazing. So naturally, alot of research has been done into howthis ability develops. And I'm going to tell you aboutthe three main theories that look at language development. So first, we startout with the nativist, or innatist perspective. And what thisperspective says is that children are born withthe ability to learn language. And the main guy associated withthis theory is Noam Chomsky. And he thought the humans hadsomething called a language acquisition device, orLAD, in their brains that allowed themto learn language. And this isn'treally supposed to be in a specific part of the brain. It's just an idea thatthis ability exists. And this worksbecause he thought that all languages shareda universal grammar, or the same basic elements,so all languages would have nouns, verbs,things like that. So the languageacquisition device enables the child topick up on and understand those types of wordsand their organization within a sentencefor any language. This goes along withthe idea that there is a "critical period"or a "sensitive period." The "critical period"is usually thought to be from birth untilabout age eight or nine, and it's the periodof time in which a child is most ableto learn a language. So if you try to learn alanguage after that age, it's a lot harder. It's not impossible. It's just a lot harder. And nativists likeChomsky would say that that's becausethe LAD only operates during that critical period. Once you start using it, thenit specializes to your language, and it becomes unable todetect other sounds and grammar from other languages. The second theory Iwant to tell you about is the learning theory. Learning theoriststhink that children aren't born with anything. They only acquire languagethrough reinforcement. So a learning theorist wouldsay that a child learns to say "mama" because every time itmakes it sound that approaches that-- so "ma-something"--then Mom starts smiling, hugging the child, so overtime, the child learns, oh, the more I make this sound,the more I get hugs and smiles. And so then, eventually,it learns to say "ma," and then say it again,and learns to say "mama." So this makes sense. But a strict learningtheory doesn't explain how children are ableto produce words they've never heard before or produceunique sentences. So we have another theory calledthe interactionist approach. Sometimes this is called thesocial interactionist approach, because these theorists believethat biological and social factors have to interactin order for children to learn language. So they would saythat children strongly desire to communicatewith others, such as the adultsin their lives, and that desiremotivates them to learn to communicate via language. And the main theorist associatedwith this school of thought is Vygotsky. He was a big proponentof the importance of social interaction inthe development of children. All three of these theorieshave made big contributions to our understanding of howchildren develop language. So the next time you lookat a baby, be impressed. They're actuallyworking really hard.
