Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

10 Key excerpts on "Language Acquisition Device (LAD)"

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  SLA Applied

  Connecting Theory and Practice

  • Brian Tomlinson, Hitomi Masuhara(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  By “device”, he is referring to his proposed concept of an LAD (ibid., pp. 33–34) – a hypothetical innate capability with which humans are born. In Chomsky’s words (ibid., p. 32), “a language-acquisition device . . . is capable of utilizing . . . primary linguistic data as the empirical basis for language learning”. In sum, he seems to be using the term “input” to mean something that contains “the linguistic primary data” that language users receive by experiencing the language in use. Chomsky’s notion of LAD and use of the terms “input” and “output” seem to provide evidence of the “mind–computer” analogy that characterised the fields of information processing and cognitive science in the 1950s and 1960s. Such an analogy seems to underlie even our contemporary definitions of input in SLA literature, whether this is explicitly acknowledged or not. Note, also, Chomsky (1965, p. 24) is interested in linguistic “competence” (i.e. “intrinsic knowledge of the idealised native speaker”) that underlies well-formed sen- tences in output, regardless of ill-formed or impoverished input in the incoming “performance” data (i.e. actual utterances that may contain errors as a result of various internal and external constraints, such as distraction, noise or memory limitation). Readers’ Tasks Chomsky (1965, pp. 59–60) argues that “knowledge of grammar . . . cannot arise” from step-by-step inductive operations such as “substitution procedures” and “filling of slots in frames” – popular teaching exercises used in the audiolingual method in the 1960s. Instead, he advocates that we should focus on the innate capability for acquiring languages, which is operationalised within an LAD. However, more than fifty years later, many materials, teachers and learners seem to assume that language acquisition will happen if they teach/learn linguistic input in an explicit manner through repeated practice and tests (e.g. gap filling, pattern practice).

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  Experimental Psycholinguistics (PLE: Psycholinguistics)

  An Introduction

  • Sam Glucksberg, Joseph H. Danks(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  First, the rules children use in the early stages are not the same rules that adults use. Second, it is doubtful that rules could be taught explicitly with much success. What would it mean to a two-year-old child to be told that we form the past tense of regular verbs by adding the suffix -ed ? Rules like this must somehow be inferred or discovered by everyone who learns to speak English as a first language. For lack of an adequate understanding of how language might be learned, a mechanism for language acquisition has been postulated. This is the LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (or LAD). The language acquisition device may consist of a unique capacity or ability that is specialized for language acquisition (Chomsky, 1968; McNeill, 1966a). Alternatively, it may consist of a concatenation of general cognitive abilities, including sensory, perceptual, conceptual, and social mechanisms (Slobin, 1971b). Whichever it may be, the language acquisition device is that subsystem of our cognitive apparatus which develops a series of grammars as the child matures. These grammars successively tend to approximate adult grammar until the final target is reached—adult language. The role of the language acquisition device in language acquisition is schematically represented in Figure 5.1, along with the potential relations among (a) the hypothetical language acquisition device; (b) the grammar; (c) external inputs (experience); and (d) various internal states. Figure 5.1 The components involved in language acquisition. Input 1 is the perception of the physical and social world, and input 2 represents the speech of people in that world. Input 3 represents the child’s developing conceptual system. The language acquisition device itself may be regarded as an integral part of that conceptual-cognitive system, or as a separate mechanism which can draw information from “cognition” and transmit information back

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  A Student's Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

  • Larry Trask(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In practice, it is these individual languages which are most easily examined, and it is important to realize that only natural languages (mother tongues) strictly count for this purpose, though linguists are none the less sometimes interested in artificial languages, pidgins and even animal communication. An individual natural language may itself be viewed either as a set of rules and principles in the minds of speakers (Chomsky’s I-language) or as a set of possible sentences (his E-language). A formal language, which is always viewed as a set of sentences, is of course not a natural language, but linguists often find it useful to construct formal languages in order to compare their properties with the observed properties of natural languages; a formal language which provides a good match may tell us important things about the structures of human languages generally. language acquisition See acquisition. Language Acquisition Device (LAD) A hypothetical mental system, supposedly present in our brains at birth, which enables us to learn a first language in childhood. The LAD supposedly consists of three parts: a set of linguistic universals, a device for constructing hypotheses about possible rules of grammar, and a procedure for evaluating these hypotheses. Proposed by Chomsky, the LAD idea has now given way in his work to the parameter-setting model. language areas The well-defined regions of the brain which play a crucial role in language production and comprehension, notably Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. language attrition The gradual loss of a language through lack of use – for example, the loss of a mother tongue by an immigrant to a country where a different language is spoken. language awareness An educational policy aimed at stimulating curiosity about language and at integrating different approaches to language within the educational system. language change Change in a language over time

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  Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics

  • Eva M. Fernández, Helen Smith Cairns(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  predisposition to acquire language; but language acquisition will not happen in a vacuum. The child must be exposed to external input to construct a grammar and a lexicon with all the properties associated with human language.

  Precisely what human biology endows the child with and what is derived from the environment is perhaps the central question in language acquisition research. Most psycholinguists endorse some version of the nativist view of language acquisition, though differences exist among them concerning exactly what aspects of language and cognition are biologically based and what role experience plays in the acquisition process. Many psycholinguists agree that language is acquired under the guidance of Universal Grammar: innate knowledge of language, which serves to restrict the type of grammar the child will develop. In addition, acquisition strategies help the child impose structure on the input. Universal Grammar accounts for the similarities observed among the world’s languages, as we argued in Chapter 2. Universal Grammar and acquisition strategies are both derived from the structure and operational characteristics of the human brain, as we discussed in Chapter 3.

  The child has been whimsically called – originally by Chomsky (1965) – a LAD, or Language Acquisition Device. The LAD is, of course, not the child but rather a property of the child’s brain that endows it with a predisposition for acquiring language. The child, exposed to language through the environment, processes the input using biologically endowed systems for language acquisition (Universal Grammar and acquisition strategies), and the eventual outcome is a grammar and a lexicon. The medium for the input is not important: the same internal processes will take place if the signal consists of speech or gestures. The specific language of the input is also not important, as long as it is a human language: English, Spanish, Chinese, or any other language can be acquired by any human child. And if the environment provides sustained exposure to more than one language, more than one grammar and more than one lexicon will develop. This model of language acquisition is diagramed in Figure 4.1

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  Desirable Literacies

  Approaches to Language and Literacy in the Early Years

  • Jackie Marsh, Elaine Hallet, Jackie Marsh, Elaine Hallet, Author(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  This chapter focuses on the important role speaking and listening activities have in the life of the young child. It begins with an overview of the child’s early language acquisition and the different perspectives offered by those researching language, and goes on to discuss the role of the adult in developing a child’s spoken language. The complexity of the acquisition process can only be lightly sketched here, the emphasis being on the importance of interaction in learning and learning to talk. This is followed by suggestions for classroom- or home-based activities.

  Language acquisition – differing perspectives

  Until the late 1950s the prevailing views on language acquisition were largely influenced by behaviourism until the work of Noam Chomsky marked a turning point in theories about the nature of language and the nature of language acquisition. The behaviourists’ claim that language is learned through the acquisition of linguistic habits and that imitation of adults’ speech plays an important role in learning is strongly countered by Chomsky’s assertion that language is ‘creative’, that is, human beings produce novel utterances when they speak, rather than imitations of what they have heard before:

  The normal use of language is innovative in the sense that much of what we say in the course of normal language use is entirely new, not a repetition of anything that we have heard before, and not even similar in pattern – in any useful sense of the terms ‘similar’ and ‘pattern’ – to sentences or discourse that we have heard in the past. (Chomsky, 1972: 12)

  To account for this ability to produce and understand novel utterances Chomsky claims that human beings possess an innate capacity to acquire language through the Language Acquisition Device (LAD), a mental mechanism specifically concerned with language. According to Chomsky, the adult utterances a child is exposed to are often too ill-formed and incomplete to serve as a suitable model to imitate. A child learning his or her first language will abstract rules from this rather shapeless language he or she encounters and incorporate these into his or her production/understanding of language, and will do so in a relatively short space of time.

  It appears that we recognise a new utterance as a sentence not because it matches some familiar pattern in any simple way, but because it is generated by the grammar that each individual has somehow and in some form internalised. Chomsky asserts that natural languages are governed by complex rules that are not apparent in ‘surface structure’, the actual utterances of a language. If a child acquiring a language had to rely solely on the snatches of language heard in his or her environment he or she would not be able to abstract, and so acquire, the rules. Evidence that children do not acquire language through imitation of adults can be seen from the ‘overgeneralisations’ evident in their speech; for example, ‘It got broked’, ‘She putted it on the carpet’. In one experiment McNeill (1966: 61) effectively demonstrated that if a child is not ready he or she will not be able to imitate an adult’s utterance:

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  Process linguistics

  Exploring the processual aspects of language and language use, and the methods of their description

  • Thomas T. Ballmer, Wolfgang Wildgen, Thomas T. Ballmer, Wolfgang Wildgen(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  McNeill (1966) for example argues that such occurrences as 'a gas here' and 'allgone lettuce' cannot be observed by the child from his environment and that, therefore, the child must have created by himself some rules accounting for these peculiar occurrences. Gruber (1967) argues that children rely in their earliest pro-ductions upon the topic-comment distinction rather than upon the subject predicate distinction, because of frequent postposition in the data of the noun with subject function. According to Gruber this topic-comment distinction must be supposed to be innate because the parents did not apply it in their productions. A last point of LA-theory that is relevant here is related to the assumption that this theory is only concerned with the growth of syntax: it is purely syntactic input which leads to the inference of syntactic structures. Chomsky's LAD is therefore nonsemantic in nature. The only role of semantics in the language acquisition process is according to him that it provides the motivation for language learning while playing no necessary part in its mechanism (Chomsky 1965; chapter 1). Wode & Felix (1979) argue that certain developmental peculiarities occur in LA irrespective the language nor whether it concerns first or second LA. 190 1.2. The language learning (LL)theory The theory - or theories - of language learning admit that the child has certain discovery or learning principles at his dis-posal but they deny that the child has specific principles for language or its grammar. LL-theories assume not that the child is able to systematize the input but that the input itself is systematically organized to a certain extent. Thus the child is not assumed to be confronted with an informant presentation but with a text presentation, i.e. only correct instances of the model language are enumerated in a specific organization. The LL-theory emphasizes the analysis of the output in its relation to the input.

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  Language & Literacy in the Early Years 0-7

  • Marian R Whitehead(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  After Chomsky’s (1957) attacks on behaviourism, researchers really listened to young children and began to note their innovative and unusual production of words and utterances, as well as their amazing sensitivity to rules, regularities and patterns in language. For example, children’s grammatical mistakes are highly systematic and rather admirable: in English they overgeneralize the rules for making plurals and past tenses once they have deduced the add an ‘-s’ or add ‘-ed’ rules respectively. Around age 2–5, children talk of ‘mouses’ and tell us that they ‘rided’ a bike. Clearly they are demonstrating some degree of sensitivity to regular patterns and a possibly innate ability to make analogies with the regular forms, such as ‘houses’ and ‘walked’. One thing is certain, they do not simply imitate adult speech and they are not taught explicitly that a grammar is a system of rules.

  The nativist view is that children are pre-programmed to learn a language and are highly sensitive to the linguistic features of their environment. Chomsky emphasizes both the process of maturation in children’s linguistic development and the essentially creative nature of all human language use. We are all continually involved in re-creating and generating new and appropriate utterances. But Chomsky’s central concern is with the human mind: he sees linguistics as the study of mind and of the mental structures that make language possible. His suggestion that there must be some internal Language Acquisition Device (LAD) that enables the young infant to process all the language it hears and generate its own meaningful utterances, led to considerable research into grammatical systems in the 1960s and 1970s. But the approach has been criticized for its tendency to look at language and the mind in a vacuum, divorced from significant human relationships and social settings, and from all the other kinds of learning with which babies are actively involved.

  Cognitive approaches

  Cognitive psychologists in the 1970s criticized the Chomskyan preoccupation with the structures of language and its comparative neglect of the personal intentions and uses to which infants put their developing linguistic knowledge, along with all their knowledge of people and the environment. Language development was seen from this perspective to be part of general cognitive development. This view can be linked with Piaget’s descriptions of the important mental structures, or schemas, created by the infant’s interactions and explorations in the environment in the first 18 or so months of life and with modern studies of the developing infant brain. It can be claimed that early language acquisition must wait for certain synaptic links and sensorimotor strategies to develop.

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  Child Language

  Acquisition and Growth

  • Barbara C. Lust(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  What then has the child acquired? Early in this century, we find the linguist Sapir’s definition of natural language: 3. “Language is a purely human and noninstinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols. These symbols are, in the first instance, auditory and they are produced by so-called organs of speech” (Sapir 1921, 8). This definition of language is not sufficient for our purposes. It appears to assume, not define, the essence of what language is. In addition, we now know from more recent studies that not only oral (auditory) but sign (visual) languages have similar structural properties and are acquired at similar developmental periods with similar developmental patterns. 2 About mid-century, the linguist De Saussure, sought to separate “from the whole of speech the part that belongs to language” (1959, 11). De Saussure’s image in Figure 2.1 suggests this analysis: As De Saussure reasoned, “psycho-logical” concepts represented in the mind are linked to “linguistic” sounds which are reflected in a physiological process: “the brain transmits an impulse corre-sponding to the (sound) image to the organs used in producing sounds”; this 1 CLAL is an abbreviation for Cornell Language Acquisition Lab, the source of the data. 2 E.g., Jackendoff 1994, chapter 7; Bellugi 1988; Kegl, Senghas and Coppola 1999; Lillo-Martin 1999; Meier 1991; Pettito 1988. What is acquired? 11 A B Fig. 2.1 “Place of language in the facts of speech” (De Saussure 1959, 11). is followed by conversion to the physical sound waves which in turn must be received by a hearer and, in reverse, converted to psychological concepts repre-sented in the mind (1959, 11). Where in this process, however, does language lie so that we can study it? Language does not lie in speech itself.

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  An Introduction to Language (w/ MLA9E Updates)

  • Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, , Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Hypotheses may be revised based on new evidence, as is the case in any science. But there is little doubt that human languages conform to abstract universal principles and that the human brain is specially equipped for acquisi- tion of human language grammars, as we will discuss in the following chapter. Stages in Language Acquisition . . . for I was no longer a speechless infant; but a speaking boy. This I remember; and have since observed how I learned to speak. It was not that my elders taught me words . . . in any set method; but I . . . did myself . . . practice the sounds in my memory. . . . And thus by constantly hearing words, as they occurred in various sentences . . . I thereby gave utterance to my will. ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions, 398 CE Children do not wake up one morning with a fully formed grammar in their heads. In moving from first words to adult competence children pass through Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. The Linguistic Capacity of Children 387 linguistic stages. They begin by babbling, they then acquire their first words, and in just a few months they begin to put words together into sentences. Studies of language acquisition are based on various sources including tape recordings and videotapes of children’s spontaneous language, usually in inter- actions with adults, as well as controlled experiments that test both their pro- ductive abilities and their comprehension of language. Researchers have also invented ingenious experimental techniques for studying the linguistic abilities of infants, who are not yet speaking.

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  Introducing Linguistics

  Theoretical and Applied Approaches

  • Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, John W. Schwieter(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  PART 6 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OVERVIEW In this chapter, you will develop an understanding of first language (L1) acquisition and will: • explore how phonology, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and communicative development occur in an L1; • discuss how internal factors such as a critical period for language acquisition, innate knowledge, and general cognition affect L1 acquisition; • study how external factors such as input and experience, feedback and recasts, and cultural and social factors affect L1 acquisition; • learn about L1 acquisition among atypical populations such as children in situations of deafness or blindness or who may have intellectual disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, or a developmental language disorder; • consider the effects of acquiring two L1s from birth; and • review some approaches to studying L1 acquisition. 12.1 What Is First Language Acquisition? Do you remember learning language as a baby? Do you recall anyone explicitly teaching it to you? Chances are you probably answered no to both. L1 acquisition is the study of infants’ and children’s development of language from birth. It is a rather quick process, happening over the first six years or so of life. It is amazing to think that newborn infants who neither speak nor understand any language are soon able to express complex ideas – and sometimes in more than one L1, as we will also discuss later in this chapter. Parents always get excited when hearing their baby’s first word. But they may not real- ize that the baby has been using language before this first word, just not in the conven- tional sense. In fact, the sounds and babbling they make communicate what they need. But when you stop to think about it, the fact that a baby shows signs of language should not be surprising at all – it should be expected. Humans are wired for language, even 12 First Language Acquisition John W. Schwieter

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