1. THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
WHAT IS A THEORY
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary a theory is
1-A set of properly argued ideas inten to explain facts and events.
ded
2-Ideas, beliefs or claims about something which may or may not be found true in practice.
According to the definition of Longman’s Dictionary Of Contemporary English, a theory is
1-An idea or a set of ideas that is intended to explain something about life or the world
especially that has not yet been proved to be true.
2-An idea that someone thinks is true but for which they have no prove.
WHAT IS LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
1-Acquisition is a process whereby children becomespeakers of their native language.
2-Acquisition is a process by which language capabilities of a person increases.
APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Various theories and approaches have been emerged over the years to study and analyze
the process of language acquisition. According to the arguments presented by Allan Paivio
Len Begg }Psychology of Language, p-222}, there exists three main school of ideas
regarding language acquis ition
1-Behavioural approaches to language acquisition
2-Linguistic approaches to language acquisition
3-Cognitive approaches to language acquisition

2. LINGUISTICS AND PSYCHOLOGY
Until non for most linguists the main aim of their discipline was providing structural
analysis of a body of language data. And to be truly scientific in their approach they dealt
with the substance of language in isolation from any sociological or psychological factors
that might effect its use .Although they had been interested in the processes involved in
using language but they believed it to be the function of the psychologists and not the
linguists to investigate. They tended to adopt fairly uncritically whatever the psychologists
proposed
But in recent years many linguists have retained this point of view that the true task of a
linguist should be not the description of individual languages but
1- the explanation of language use.
2- This in turn demands research into human capacity for language
3- And this involves the incorporation of psychology into linguistics.
So today’s linguists say
1-Linguistics is a branch of psychology or
2-Psychology is a branch of linguistics since language is central to all human activities.
The main areas of psycholinguistics is language acquisition
1-How do children acquire their mother tongue
2-The way people learn foreign language
3-The relationship between words and thoughts
PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
According to Wilkins}Linguistics in Language Teaching] there exists two highly
contrasting general accounts of language acquisition
1-Behaviourism
2-Mentalism

3. BEHAVIORISM
IS BEHAVIOUR WHAT
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary behavior is
1-One,s attitude or manner
2-Some act or function in a particular situation
WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE
According to Oxford AdvanceLearners Dictionary Behavioral Science is
The study of human behavior
Since linguistics is also included in behavioral sciences, it purpose as well is the study of
language with respect to human behavior
WHAT IS BEHAVIORISM
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary, Behaviorism is
1-the theory that all human behavior is learnt to fit in with external conditions and is not
influenced by people’s thoughts and feelings.
According to the definition of Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Behaviorism
is
2-The belief the scientific study of the mind should be based only on people’s behavior, not
on what they say about their th oughts and feelings.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO BEHAVIORISM
In 1913, in one of the most famous lectures in the history of psychology, John Broadus
Watson (1878-1958), a 35-year-old quot;animal behavior manquot; from Johns Hopkins
University, called for a radical revision of the scope and method of psychological research.:

4. quot;Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural
science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms
no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the
readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The
behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no
dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and
complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation.quot;
Introspection was to be abandoned in favor of the study of behavior. Behavior was to be
evaluated in its own right, independent of its relationship to any consciousness that might
exist. The concept of quot;consciousnessquot; was to be rejected as an interpretive standard and
eschewed as an explanatory device. As an objective, natural science, psychology was to
make no sharp distinction between human and animal behavior; and its goal was to develop
principles by which behavior could be predicted andcontrolled.
Published in the Psychological Review shortly after its delivery and incorporated within the
first chapter of Watson's 1914 Behavior: A Textbook of Comparative Psychology, this
lecture eventually came to be known as the quot;behaviorist manifesto.quot; Generations of
psychologists, reared in a post-Watsonian discipline that defined itself as the quot;science of
behavior,quot; were taught that Watson was the father of behaviorism and that February 24,
1913 was the day on which modern behaviorism was born.
Yet behaviorism did eventually spread throughout American psychology. During the
1920s, across the work of a growing number of psychologists, there emerged a reasonably
coherent set of intellectual commitments to which the name quot;behaviorismquot; gradually
became attached. Based on the rejection of mentalism in psychological theory, a dedication
to the use of objective methodology in research, and a strong concern with practical
application of psychological knowledge to the prediction and control of behavior,
quot;behaviorismquot; in the 1920s owed an obvious debt to Watson.
A RICHER VERSION OF BEHAVIORISM
At the same time, however, behaviorism grew during this period in part by diverging from
and transcending Watson. Influenced by broader conceptions of objectivism and of

5. psychological process developing at Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Missouri, Ohio State,
Minnesota, North Carolina, and even Hopkins, behaviorism had become, by the end of the
1920s, a more thoroughly elaborated, theoretically more varied and sophisticated approach
than anything to be found in Watson's own writings. It was this richer version of
behaviorism, rather than Watsonianism , that succeeded in transforming American
psychology; and it did so not by converting the old guard but by capturing the enthusiasm
of the young. As succeeding generations of psychologists entered the discipline,
objectivism gradually became the norm; and by the mid-1930s, American psychology had
become the science of behavior, and behaviorism, methodological and/or theoretical, had
become its dominant orientation.
DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO BEHAVIORISM
Even among those who identified themselves as quot;behaviorists,quot; agreement on the program
was by no means unanimous. Early behaviorism took a variety of forms]. There was---
1- the radical behaviorism of Watson, a view notable for its extreme anti-mentalism,
its radical reduction of thinking to implicit response, and, especially after 1916, its
heavy and somewhat simplistic theoretical reliance on conditioned reactions.
2- There was the relational behaviorism of the Harvard group, developed by Edwin
Bissell Holt (1873-1946). Conceiving of behavior as quot;a course of action which the
living body executes or is prepared to execute with regard to some object or fact of
its environment,quot; Holt's behaviorism was molar, purposive and focused on the
relationship between high-level behavioral mechanisms in the organism and the
concrete realities of the social and physical environment.
3- Closely related to this view was a kind of philosophical behaviorism, espoused
primarily by philosophers and tied to pragmatism, in which quot;consciousnessquot; was
defined as a form of behavior guided by future results.]
4- Albert Paul Weiss (1879-1931) was developing a bio-social behaviorism based on
a radical distinction between the level of theoretical discourse appropriate to behavior
analyzed as social cause (i.e., quot;biosociallyquot;) and that appropriate to behavior analyzed as
sensorimotor effect (i.e., quot;biophysicallyquot;).

6. 5-At Minnesota, Karl Spencer Lashley (1890-1958) was arguing a physiological
behaviorism in which the physiological analysis of behavior could be considered quot;a
complete and adequate account of all the phenomena of consciousness.quot;
6- At the University of Chicago, George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), who had been on
the faculty since Watson was a graduate student, was elaborating a social behaviorism of
mind, meaning, self, language, and thinking that emphasized the social character of
behavior and the behavioral character of mind.
7- Finally, in a number of institutions, a sort of eclectic behaviorism was emerging-a
behaviorism that assimilated whatever seemed strongest and most reliable in the views of
others.
PSYCHOLOGY FOR BEHAVIORISTS
As a natural science, psychology takes the study of behavior as its fundamental task.
Whatever else psychology might be, for early behaviorism it was fundamentally the
science of behavior, where behavior was defined in terms of the organism's organized
response to stimulation. Depending on the theorist and the reaction system in question,
response might be overt or covert, implicit or explicit, clear and well-defined or vague and
obscure, molecular or molar, simple or complex. Response might consist of an actual act or
simply of the adoption of an attitude, tendency, or set; it might be controlled by the
proximal stimulus or directed toward objects in the environment. But however otherwise
conceived, for the behaviorist, response involved the operation of effector systems-muscles
and glands. Behavior had to do with quot;how, when, and why a man does this or that, acts thus
and so, desires, seeks, accepts, rejects-in a word, moves.quot;
ADJUSTMEMT AND MALADJUSTMENT
. In the 1920s, behaviorists were united in the assumption that behavior results when the
organism's relationship to the environment must be changed if it is to survive and prosper.
Behaviorism referred to such states as quot;maladjustmentsquot;. Maladjustment is a natural
byproduct of change in the organism (e.g., an increase in drive level) or in the environment
(e.g., a rise in ambient air temperature); and behavior, which is a process of adjustment,

7. consists of responses on the part of the organism that tend to restore balance in its
relationship to the environment.
POLYGENETIC CONTINUITY
. For early behaviorism, animal and human behavior exist in an quot;unbroken continuity,quot;
Animals and humans share both mechanisms and fundamental forms of overt adjustment to
the environment. This view, which originated with Watson's desire to place the study of
animal behavior high on the psychological research agenda, was reinforced by
psychology's early success in extending trial-and-error and conditioning analyses from
animals to humans. As Dashiell summarized the continuity commitment: quot;The genus and
species Homo sapiens is moved by the same forces without and within as are the lower
animal forms, and expresses them in the same general types of actions and action-
tendencies. The differences are differences in degree...quot;
THE DETERMINATION OF BEHAVIOR/
STIMULUS RESPONSE PSYCHOLOGY.
Behavior, from a behaviorist point of view, is a joint function of stimulating conditions in
the environment and characteristics (drive states, hereditary reflexes, acquired systems of
habit, emotions, mechanisms of implicit stimulation) within the organism. In its earliest
formulations, this commitment, from which behaviorism later became known as quot;stimulus-
responsequot; or quot;S-Rquot; psychology, was somewhat too simply phrased. Thus, for example, in
1919, Watson said only that: quot;In each adjustment there is always both a response or-act
and a stimulus or situation which call] out that response....the stimulus is always provided
by the environment, external to the body, or by the movements of man's own muscles and
the secretions of his glands...[and] responses always follow relatively immediately upon the
presentation or incidence of the stimulus.quot;
THE CLASSIFICATION OF BEHAVIOR
. Although many behaviorists pointed to the indissociability of response types in actual
behavior, early behaviorism remained wedded to the classification of response in terms of
three major categories: a) somatic/hereditary (pre-potent reflexes, instinctive reaction
tendencies); b) somatic/acquired (systems of habits); or c) visceral/hereditary and acquired
(emotions). Responses in all three categories were then further classified as explicit,
implicit, or preparatory (attitudinal).

8. Distinctions between instinctive, habitual, and emotional reaction systems were delineated
by Watson in 1919. quot;Human action as a whole,quot; he wrote. quot;can be divided into
hereditary...(emotional and instinctive), and acquired modes of response (habit).quot;For
Watson, all three response modes were quot;pattern reactions,quot; complex systems of reflexes
that function in an organized fashion when the organism is confronted with an appropriate
stimulus.
BEHAVIORAL REDEFINITION OF THE TRADITIONAL CATEGORIES OF
MENTALISM
. At the heart of early behaviorism lay a commitment to the notion that mentalistic
categories and concepts (e.g., perception, attention, meaning, symbol, memory, purpose,
abstraction, generalization, thought) must either be redefined in terms of behavioral
mechanisms or discarded altogether. In 1913, Watson excluded mind in its entirety from
behaviorism. Not only was consciousness rejected as both fact and concept, but associated
mental terms were to be discarded as well. This was the most extreme version of this
commitment; and other early behaviorists did not, as a rule, follow Watson down this path.
By far the most common approach was to redefine the standard concepts of mental analysis
in strictly behavioral terms. A few examples will suffice.
quot;Perceiving,quot; for Dashiell, was an quot;anticipatory set (largely implicit) that orients...[the
organism] for a certain line of conduct with reference to...[the] situation.quot; quot;Meaningquot; was
quot;the pattern of reaction-tendencies awakened by...[the thing perceived.]quot; For Allport, a
quot;symbolquot; was quot;a brief and labile response usually undetected in outward behavior, but
capable of being substituted for overt responses.quot; quot;Consciousness,quot; in Weiss's terms, was
quot;only the functioning of obscure contractile elements, which in turn stimulate adjacent
receptors that release the verbal overt response...quot; And quot;thinking,quot; in that famous analysis
of Watson, simply meant quot;subvocal talking, general body language habits, bodily sets or
attitudes which are not easily observable without instrumentation or experimental aid.quot;
ANIMAL MODELS
. Behaviorism emphasized the identification of fundamental mechanisms in animal
behavior (e.g., trial and error learning, conditioning) and use of such mechanisms, without
significant theoretical revision, in the explanation of human behavior. This approach,
which followed directly from the commitment to phylogenetic continuity, was largely
unquestioned among early behaviorists. Indeed, as behavioral research began to develop in
the late 1920's and 1930's, many of the most important studies focused on animals and
many core theoretical concepts came to be defined almost entirely in terms of the
procedures of animal behavior research.

9. HABIT FORMATION
. An emphasis on habit formation defined in terms of mechanisms of trial-and-error
elaboration of response and conditioned stimulus substitution was probably the
characteristic with which early behaviorism was most closely associated. Behaviorism in
the 1920's was first, last, and always a psychology of habit formation. Acquired behavior,
no matter how complex-thinking, talking, even scientific activity itself-could, in the final
analysis, be reduced to habit.
TRIAL AND ERROR MECHANISM
The trial-and-error mechanism (increase in random movement upon confrontation with a
problem situation, accidental success when chance response alters the organism or the
environment in the direction of greater adjustment, and gradual, mechanical selection and
reinforcement of successful movement) was usually employed to explain efferent
modification, the elaboration of the response itself. The conditioned reaction was typically
evoked to explain afferent modification-change in the effectiveness of stimuli, including
those that are purely social and symbolic, in eliciting a given response.
LANGUAGE
. For behaviorists in the 1920's, self-stimulation and response was intimately linked to
language. For both the self in thinking and the social listener in communication, language
responses were conceived as substitute, symbolic stimuli, independent of the sensory
attributes of the original stimulus. In this role, they subserved the related functions of
abstraction and generalization. As Weiss , who pioneered this analysis, asserted:
quot;...many different receptor patterns representative of many different sensory situations and
relations, are connected to the same language response and through this common path the
individual may react in a specific manner to all the objects, situations, and relations thus
concerned, even though there is very little sensory similarity between them.quot;
CONCLUSION
Psychology defined as the natural science of behavior, wedded to objectivism in method
and theory and to a goal of behavioral prediction and control; behavior, animal or human,
conceived as a pattern of adjustment (innate and acquired, skeletal and visceral, explicit
and implicit) functionally dependent upon stimulus conditions in the environment and
factors of habit and drive in the organism; emphasis in research and theory on animal
behavior, ontogenesis, drive reduction, habit formation, social behavior, and language-this

10. was the orientation that began, following World War I, to capture the imagination of young
psychologists and to spread within American psychology throughout the 1920's. This was
behaviorism in its early form.
SOME COMMON APPROACHES TO BEHAVIORISM
Conditioned reflexes---------------------------Ivan Pavlov
Experimental method------------------------John B. .Watson
Operant conditioning-----------------------B.F.Skinner
CONDITIONED REFLEXES/CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Pavlov a Russian Scientist made the discovery that led to the real beginning of
behaviorism. Pavlov and most of his contemporaries saw classical conditioning as learning
that comes from exposing an organism to association of environment events.
THE PAVLOVIAN EXPERIMENT
While studying digestive reflexes in dogs, Pavlov found out that it could reliably be
predicted that the dogs would salivate when food was placed in the mouth through a reflex
called the salivary reflex in digestion. Yet he soon realized that after some time salivary
reflex occurs even before the food was offered. Because of the sound of the door and the
sight of the attendant carrying the food. The dogs had transferred the reflex to these
repeated actions.
Thus the dogs learnt a new behavior. It was maintained by the behaviorists that language as
well is a sort of behavior that can be acquired in ideal social conditions. According to them
language is essentially the product of the society.
OPERANT CONDITIONING
Behaviorist theory takes language acquis ition as a process of habit-formation through
stimuli-response model, as represented in Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957):
1) The child imitates the sounds and patterns which he hears from around him.
2) People recognize the child’s attempts as being similar to the adult models
and reinforce (reward) the sounds, by approval or some other desirable reaction.
3) In order to obtain more of these rewards, the child repeats the sounds and patterns, so
that these become habits.

11. 4) In this way the child’s verbal behavior is conditioned (or ‘shaped’) until the habits
coincide with the adult models.
Thus children learn language in the following steps
IMITATION
REPETITION
MEMORIZATION
CONTROLLED DRILLING
REINFORCEMENT
1-IMITATION AND REINFORCEMENT
Children just imitate what they hear. Parents teach them by telling them when they make
mistakes.Children start ou as clean slates and through the process of imitation they get
t
linguistic habits printed on these slates. So we can say that language acquisition is a
process of experience.
2-CONDITIONED RESPONSE/STIMULUS RESPONSE PROCESS
The operant conditioning proposed by skinner is based upon four elements
Stimulus------Response---------Reinforcement----------Repetition
The hunger or loneliness ----------------------------------------------Stimulus
The baby cries-----------------------------------------------------------Response
The mother comforts him----------------------------------------------Reinforcement
The same process happens again------ --------------------------------Repetition
The baby cries whenever hungry---------------------------------------New behavior
CHOMSKYS EXPERIMENTATION
Chomsky performed some experiments on rats
THE VALIDITY OF BEHAVIORISM
CRITIQUE
1-Behaviourist accounts of L2 acquisition emphasize only what can be directly observed
(input) and ignore what goes on in the ‘black box’ of the learner’s mind, viewing the

12. learner as merely ‘a language producing machine’. There was little room for any active
processing by the learner. Its learning model is demonstrated as:
A {input} Reinforcement A{Output}
But this model fails to reflect the true picture of children’s L2 acquisition in which the
output is different from the input:
A (input) Reinforcement A+ (output)
A+ is the multiplication resulted from the process of ‘A’ in the black box. If the child’s
linguistic output does not match the input, the explanation must lie in the internal
processing that has taken place, something that induced the Mantalists to go to another
extreme of innatist
.
2-Irregular Grammatical patterns
Behaviorism does not explain how children learn to handle irregular grammatical patterns
3-Languaoge a matter of maturation rather than imitation
Children seem unable to imitate exactly the adults grammatical structure at the beginning.
They learn these structures with the passage of time no matter how much parents try to
teach them. Thus language is a matter of maturation rather than imitation.
4-The most dramatic evidence against behaviorism is the fact that the children who can not
speak at all but who can hear normally acquire normal competence in language
comprehension.
5-Several kinds of evident suggest that imitation , in the sense of a child’s attempt to
reproduce the adults actual utterances he hear does not play an important role in the
acquisition of syntax.
5-One of the relatively empirical problem is that relatively few experiments have been done
with infants and that these have typically dealt with general effects on vocalization.
6-According to Chomsky argumentsman is superior to animals with respect to language
acquisition so we can never apply the rules and principles to language learning which are
derived from the experiments on animal.
7-For Chomsky the acquisition of incredibly complex language by chil ren can not simply
d
be explained by imitation. It definitely has something to do with innate capabilities

13. CONCLUSION
The above two theories can not give satisfactory answers to SLA, because each goes to a
polar extreme. The debate between behaviourism and mentalism arises the theory of
cognitivism, which agrees with the mentalists that children must make use of innate
knowledge, but disagrees about its nature. Cognitivism, on one hand admits the active
processing by the learner, and on the other hand attaches much importance to the input and
the interaction between internal and external factors.