Assignment on Brain Mind and Behaviour
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Added on 2020-04-13
Assignment on Brain Mind and Behaviour
Added on 2020-04-13
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Running head: BRAIN MIND AND BEHAVIOURBRAIN MIND AND BEHAVIOURName of the Student:Name of the University:Author note:
1BRAIN MIND AND BEHAVIOURThe term language acquisition refers to the process through which one individual learnsthe use of language for everyday communication. A number of theories have been developed forthe better understanding of the process of the acquisition of language. The process quite naturallybegins from the very early age. As soon as a child starts to understand or at least have an idea ofthe environment he is belonging to the process of acquisition starts to develop. There are varioustheories about how individuals start learning the basics of language. Grammar, being aninevitable part of language, it is necessary to understand how a child acquires the knowledge ofgrammar in the process of acquiring language. This essay is going to focus on the idea ofwhether innate learning of grammar is necessary for a child to acquire the learning of grammar.The essay is going to focus on both the sides of the idea basing on the recent studies over theidea.How a child acquires the skill of grammar is one of the most researched topics in the fieldof language. Noam Chomsky is one of the first linguists to shed light on this issue. He gave theidea of language acquisition device or LAD (Chomsky, 2014). This implies that all the humanbeings are born with an innate quality for acquiring language and it does not take any additionaleffort to acquire the language in order to communicate in the basic level. The LAD works as ahardwired device that is naturally installed in the brain and helps in the process of acquiringlanguage. This concept of the brain having a pre-wired device to acquire language had beenbrought forward in order to make the process of children learning language understandable.According to it all the children posses the same kind of syntactic order and grammar inside theirhead and no effort from outside would be necessary to make the children understand the basicrules of grammar. However, LAD being more of a theoretical device explains the process ofevaluation that the human mind possesses that makes it particularly spectacular in learning
2BRAIN MIND AND BEHAVIOURlanguages (Kessel, 2013). However, this view of acquiring grammar and language had beencontradicted by behaviourists. According to them, language acquisition, rather than being aninnate tool is rather developed by behaviours. The pioneer linguists of theory further argued thathuman beings learn languages by different kinds of conditionings like classical conditioning andoperant conditioning. Another theory that behaviourists put forward are that language acquisitionis also done in the process of imitation and observation (MacWhinney, 2014). Behaviouristsexplained the process of learning in children by suggesting that they learn language by attachingobjects to sounds and also by following the gestures of the surrounding people, he is growing upwith. This difference of view between the innate theory and the behaviourist theory continueseven in the modern times. Amid modern day linguists the names of Pinker and Tomasello maybe mentioned who are supporters of the two different views. Pinker has dealt quitesympathetically with Chomsky’s theory that all the humans are born with an innate capacity oflearning language. He has fiercely criticized the ideas, which refer to the notion that childrenhave to be taught grammar as well as the proper use of language (Mitchel, Myles & Marsden,2013). Pinker’s theory bases itself on the idea that language is an ability that is unique to humanbeings which is there to solve the problem of communication among them. He compareslanguage to an instinct that comes naturally to human beings just as making a web comesnaturally to a spider or making dam building comes naturally to beavers (Mitchel, Myles &Marsden, 2013). As Pinker calls language an instinct, he means that it is not an invention ofhuman beings like writing or reading is. In support of his argument, he states that while onlysome cultures posses the acquired skills like reading, writing, or some kind of metalwork,language is universal to every culture and every individual (Mitchel, Myles & Marsden, 2013).
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