La Anorexia

4.1 child language acquisition theory – chomsky, crystal, Aitchison & piaget
Chomsky
Noam Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited ability to learn any human language. He claims that certain linguistic structures which children use so accurately must be already imprinted on the child’s mind. Chomsky believes that every child has a ‘language acquisition device’ or LAD whichencodes the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children have then only to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures from the LAD to form sentences. Chomsky points out that a child could not possibly learn a language through imitation alone because the language spoken around them is highly irregular – adult’s speech is often broken up andeven sometimes ungrammatical. Chomsky’s theory applies to all languages as they all contain nouns, verbs, consonants and vowels and children appear to be ‘hard-wired’ to acquire the grammar. Every language is extremely complex, often with subtle distinctions which even native speakers are unaware of. However, all children, regardless of their intellectual ability, become fluent in their nativelanguage within five or six years.
Evidence to support Chomsky’s theory
• Children learning to speak never make grammatical errors such as getting their subjects, verbs and objects in the wrong order.
• If an adult deliberately said a grammatically incorrect sentence, the child would notice.
• Children often say things that are ungrammatical such as ‘mama ball’, which they cannothave learnt passively.
• Mistakes such as ‘I drawed’ instead of ‘I drew’ show they are not learning through imitation alone.
• Chomsky used the sentence ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’, which is grammatical although it doesn’t make sense, to prove his theory: he said it shows that sentences can be grammatical without having any meaning, that we can tell the difference between agrammatical and an ungrammatical sentence without ever having heard the sentence before, and that we can produce and understand brand new sentences that no one has ever said before.
Evidence against Chomsky’s theory
• Critics of Chomsky’s theory say that although it is clear that children don’t learn language through imitation alone, this does not prove that they must have an LAD  – languagelearning could merely be through general learning and understanding abilities and interactions with other people.
Dialogue –
Parent and Child (3 years old)
Parent: What did you do today?
Child: Me drawed a cat. (applies –ed suffix rule but gets wrong)
Parent: You drew a cat?
Child: Yeah. (understands correction)
Parent: Who did you play with at breaktime?
Child: Me played with Sarah andHelen. (wrong pronoun – not learnt passively)
Parent: That sound fun. Now what do you want for tea?
Child: Dunno. What you having?
Parent: Daddy and I are having fish.
Child: You having fishes? (incorrect use of plural noun but shows child applying rules)
Parent: Yes. I’ll do you some fish fingers and if you’re a good girl and eat    them all you can have a sweetie. (applying plural noun rule)Child: Me want two sweeties.
Parent: Alright then. Now go and watch Postman Pat while I start the tea.
Child: When Daddy coming home? (gets SVO order correct all the time)
Parent: He’ll be here soon.
David Crystal
 
David Crystal’s Theory On Child Language Acquisition
Professor Crystal is best known for his two encyclopaedias The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language and The CambridgeEncyclopaedia of the English Language. So what does this have to do with child language acquisition?
David Crystal has the theory that children learn language in five stages, which aren’t clearly defined and some tie in with each other.
These stages are:
Stage One:
This is where children say things for three purposes:
1. To get something they want
2. To get someone’s attention
3. To draw...