Theories of language acquisition: behaviourism (Skinner), nativism (Chomsky), cognitivism (Piaget), social interactionism (Bruner and Vygotsky) and the evidence for each.

What this topic is asking

AQA wants you to explain and evaluate the main theories of how children acquire language: behaviourism, nativism, cognitivism and social interactionism, weighing the evidence and criticisms of each and applying them to child language data. In the exam you rarely write about a theory in the abstract. You use it to explain a transcript or a piece of child writing, so you must know not only what each theorist claimed but what kind of evidence supports or weakens it.

Behaviourism: learning by imitation and reinforcement

The model has real explanatory power for the parts of language that obviously are copied: a child's regional accent, the vocabulary of their household, and fixed politeness formulae such as "ta" or "please" are clearly modelled by caregivers. It also fits the observation that children reared in talk-rich homes tend to have larger vocabularies.

The problems are serious, though. Children constantly produce forms they have never heard, the classic example being the virtuous error "goed" or "sheeps": no adult says these, so imitation cannot be the source. They must be over-applying a rule (add "-ed" for past tense), which is rule-building, not copying. Roger Brown's research found that parents typically correct the truth value of an utterance ("no, that is a dog") rather than its grammar, so the reinforcement of grammatical accuracy that behaviourism needs is largely absent. Finally, the sheer speed of acquisition, a working grammar by around age four, is too fast for trial-and-error conditioning to explain.

Nativism: an innate capacity for language

Several findings support nativism. Acquisition follows a predictable order across very different languages and cultures, suggesting an inbuilt programme rather than environment-driven learning. Eric Lenneberg's critical period hypothesis proposes a biological window (roughly up to puberty) for natural acquisition, and creolisation studies show children of pidgin speakers spontaneously regularising the language into a full grammar their input did not contain, which looks like Universal Grammar at work.

Critics argue nativism underplays meaning and interaction, treating the child almost as a grammar machine and the caregiver as a mere input source. It also struggles to specify exactly what is in Universal Grammar in a testable way.

Cognitivism: language follows thought

The evidence here is the link between cognitive and linguistic stages, for example the appearance of words marking time and sequence as the child develops temporal reasoning. The limitation is the existence of children with severe cognitive impairment who nonetheless develop fluent, complex grammar, which suggests language is at least partly modular and not simply downstream of general intelligence.

Social interactionism: language built through interaction

The supporting evidence is strong. Child-directed speech, with its higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, simplified grammar and repetition, demonstrably aids uptake. Deprivation cases such as Genie, isolated until age 13 and never acquiring normal grammar, show that without interaction the innate capacity does not fully develop. Interactionism is best read not as a rival to nativism but as the account of how an innate capacity gets activated and shaped, which is why a synthesised conclusion is usually the strongest exam move.

Try this

• Take a child language transcript and label one feature that supports nativism (a virtuous error) and one that supports interactionism (a response to child-directed speech).
• Write a sentence explaining why Brown's correction finding weakens behaviourism.
• Summarise how a synthesised conclusion would treat the four theories as complementary rather than competing.