Pling Chapter 1: Language learning in early childhood

Language, 2012

The field of language acquisition has long suffered from a lack of serious, real dialogue between competing approaches. It is to be welcomed, then, that researchers of Ambridge and Lieven's caliber are spearheading a movement toward more collaboration in understanding the complexities, advantages, and disadvantages of different viewpoints. Child language acquisition (CLA) is a monumental effort to kickstart more unbiased, comprehensive comparisons between competing generativist and constructivist theories of language development. The book's intended audience is researchers and instructors for undergraduate/graduate courses, although as we see below, some caveats apply.

2015

Investigating the processes through which individuals acquire language is Language acquisition. In general, acquisition of language points to native language acquisition, which examines children’s acquisition of their first language, while second language acquisition concerns acquisition of extra languages in children and adults as well. The history of language learning theories can be considered as a great pendulum cycled from Skinnerian environmentalism to Piagetian constructivism to Chomskian innatism. Consequently, much of research in this field has been revolved around the debates about whether cognitive process and structure are constrained by innately predetermined mechanism or shaped by environmental input. Linguists Noam Chomsky and Eric Lenneberg, for half a century have argued for the hypothesis that children have inborn, language-specific capabilities that make possible and restrict language learning. Others, like Catherine Snow, Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney have...