Contemporary theories of language acquisition

• Theoretical perspectives on language development

  
• Interactionist view of language development

  Most modern theories of language development recognize that language is shaped by environmental input + biologically predisposed opposed to learn language in general.

  • They draw on the strengths of the theories covered so far
  • These theories also recognize more the role of the child as an active agent as opposed to just a passive recipient.
  • It’s not the case that the child is just constantly receiving language input, they are a conversational partner, and caregivers accommodate their language to the children’s language ability
• Statistical learning approach

  • Builds on the domain-general connectionist accounts, but emphasis is on tracking the probability of sequences/patterns of speech sounds occurring.
  • Creating ‘rules’ or patterns
  • Language learning becomes more sophisticated as previous evidence is used to evaluate the strength of the rule or pattern
• Evidence for the Statistical approach

  • Saffran and colleagues (1996) → 8-month-olds heard strings of syllables that contain some syllables that tended to co-occur together. After listening for a few minutes, infants seem to learn which groups of sound reliably occur together as words.
  • Indicated by their preference for novel combinations of these sounds.