Language Development in children

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN

All the other ways of knowing are controlled by language . The appropriate use of language is central to virtually all aspects of learning and social development . Successful and appropriate language communication is also closely linked to the individual 's place in society , while the inability to communicate clearly hampers and may virtually eliminate a person 's ability to cope with even the simplest educational and social situations

The manner in which children learn to understand and successfully communicate through language is among the most important questions

studied by psychologists . The appropriate use of language is central to virtually all aspects of learning and social development . Successful and appropriate language communication is also closely linked to the individual 's place in society , while the inability to communicate clearly hampers and may virtually eliminate a person 's ability to cope with even the simplest educational and social situations

Traditionally , psychological accounts of language development have been developed by theorists who have included language learning in their discussions of a general acquisition process (e .g . Miller and Dollard 1941 Skinner , 1957 . Skinner for example , believes that language is learned in large measure by waiting for children to emit approximations of the forms of speech which are ultimately desired and then by gradual shaping (by parents or other socializing agents ) until the correct sounds and sentence forms can be reproduced in appropriate situations with a high degree of fidelity . In contrast , some psycholinguists (e .g Chomsky , 1959 Fodor , 1966 ) have cogently argued that operant learning theory cannot adequately account for complex verbal behavior . Chomsky (1959 ) offers the following pregnant critique of a conditioning viewpoint .it seems quite beyond questions that children acquire a good deal of their verbal and non-verbal behavior by casual observation and imitation of adults and other children . It is simply not true that children can learn language only through meticulous care ' on the part of adults who shape their verbal repertoire through careful differential reinforcement , though it may be that such care is often the custom in academic families . It is a common observation that a young child of immigrant parents may learn a second language in the streets , from other children , with amazing rapidity , and that his speech may be completely fluent and correct to the last allophone . A child may pick up a large part of his vocabulary and feel ' for sentence structure from television , from reading , from listening to adults , etc . Even a very young child who has not yet acquired a minimal repertoire from which to form new utterances may imitate a word quite well on an early try , with no attempt on the part of his parents to teach it to him (p . 42

Numerous experiments have now disclosed that principles for generating novel responses can be acquired through the observation of others (for example , Bandura McDonald , 1963 Bandura Mischel , 1965 . If principles of language usage , rather than mere words can be shown to be acquired through observational learning , then this...