Page 196 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes that our environment affects all of us in the same way. Others have suggested that everybody has an
innate language learning mechanism which determines learning or acquisition of language identically
for each of us. These two schools are known as ‘empiricists’ (behaviourists) and ‘rationalists’ (mentalists).
The empiricists say that all knowledge is derived from experience. They are of the opinion that children
start out as clean slates. Learning a language is a process of getting linguistic habits printed on these
slates. Language acquisition is the result of stimulus-response activities. Imitation, repetition,
memorization, reward, and reinforcement faciliate this process of language acquisition. The
behaviourists argue that learning is controlled by the conditions under which it takes place and that,
as long as individuals are subjected on the same condition, they will learn in the same way. Variations
in learning are caused because of the difference in learning experience, difference in the past experience
of learning, difference in aptitudes, motivation, memory and age. So, for them there is not a theory of
language learning as such but merely the application to language of general principles of learning.
From this follows that in general there is no difference between the way one learns a language and
the way one learns to do anything else. So, according to the empiricists, language is a result of stimulus
and response. A child should therefore learn to make a response in the first place, and then the
response should be reinforced in a variety of ways. Indeed strength of learning is measured in terms
of the number of times that a response has been made and reinforced. A word that has been uttered
thirty times is better learned than one which has been said twenty times. So language learning process
is basically a mechanical process of habit formation. Habits are strengthened by reinforcement.

Language is behaviour, a conditioned behaviour which can be learned only by
inducing the child to behave. Repetition plays a vital role in learning a language.
Hence the necessity of mechanical drills and exercises, imitation and repetition.

The rationalists contradict the empiricists at almost every point. Children learn a language, not because
they are subjected to a similar conditioning process, but because they possess an inborn capacity
which permits them to acquire a language as a normal maturational process. This capacity is universal.
The child has an innate language acquiring device. He learns a language by exposure to it in society
and by unconsciously forming certain hypotheses about language, which he goes on modifying till
he comes to the adult model to which he is for the most part exposed. So the child goes on constructing
an innate grammar, operating overgeneralized rules.
Language acquisition is species-specific and species-uniform. The ability to take up and understand
language is inherited genetically but the particular language that children speak, is culturally and
environmentally transmitted to them. Children all over the world acquire their native tongue without
tutoring. Whereas a child exposed to an English speaking community begins to speak English fluently,
the other one exposed to a community of Hindi speakers, begins to use Hindi fluently. Only human
beings can acquire language. Language acquisition thus appears to be different in kind from acquisition
of other skills such as swimming, dancing, or gymnastics. Native language acquisition is much less
likely to be affected by mental retardation than the acquisition of other intellectual activities. Every
normal human child learns one or more language unless he is brought up in linguistic isolation, and
learns the essentials of his language by a fairly little age, say by six. To acquire fluency in a language
a child has to be exposed to people who speak that language. A language is not something we know
by instinct or inherit from our parents. It is the result of our exposure to a certain linguistic community.
It is part of that whole complex of learned and shared behaviour that anthropologists call ‘culture’.
By this we do not mean that language is acquired ready-made. It is created anew by each child by
putting together bits and pieces of environmental raw material. The human child does play an active
role in this process; he actively strains, filters, recognizes what he is exposed to. His imitations are not
photographic reproductions but artistic recreations. A child is a linguist in cradle. He acquires a
language more easily than adults. He discovers the structure of his native language to use that
language; no one hands it to him in a ready-to-use form.

190 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY