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First Language Acquisition

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Submitted By villaran
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Nature or Nurture
Psychologists argue on what are the behaviors caused by biological or nature and environmental or nurture.
Still it is questioned if how is it sure that learning can be determined by the environment the child is in.
Then here’s Derek Bickerton (1981) who proposes what human beings are bio-programmed. Like flowering plants, people are innately, or inborn to release certain language from stage to stage.
Chomsky states here that knowledge or our ability in language is innate in us when were born.
Universal
Closely related to the innateness controversy is the claim that language is universally acquired in the same manner, and moreover, that the deep structured of language at its deepest level may be common to all languages.
The child’s initial state is supposed to consist of a set of universal principles which specify some limited possibilities of variation, expressible in terms of parameters which need to be fixed in one of a few possible ways (Saleemi 1992:58)
In simpler terms, this means that the child task of language learning is manageable because of certain naturally occurring constraints
Imitations
It is a common, informal observation that children are “good imitators”. We think of children typically as imitators and mimics, and then conclude that imitation is one of the important strategies a child uses in the acquisition of language.
Here are some problems with the imitation perspective:
Children produce many things not in the adult grammar. (like ‘nana’ for banana), i.e. they produce things not produced by adults. Some people might say that this is simply a consequence of the difficulty of learning how to speak and not a problem for the imitation.
Children make consistent, predictable errors that cannot be attributed to mispronunciation and which still are not ever heard in the adult grammar. Children make errors like saying

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