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Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition involves structures, rules, and representation.
The main purpose of theories of second-language acquisition (SLA) is to shed light on how people who already know one language learn a second language. The field of second-language acquisition involves various contributions, such as linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and education. These multiple fields ...
Vygotsky, a psychologist and social constructivist, laid the foundation for the interactionists view of language acquisition.According to Vygotsky, social interaction plays an important role in the learning process and proposed the zone of proximal development (ZPD) where learners construct the new language through socially mediated interaction.
[3] [4] In this model, skill acquisition is seen as a progression from declarative to procedural knowledge. [4] Adaptive control of thought is a general model of cognition, and second-language acquisition is just one application of a wide area of research in cognitive psychology. [5]
The view that language must be learned was especially popular before 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap. Likewise, the behaviorist school of psychology puts forth the point of view that language is a behavior shaped by conditioned response; hence it is learned.
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. [1] [2] It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and ...
The theory has often been extended to a critical period for second-language acquisition (SLA). David Singleton states that in learning a second language, "younger = better in the long run", but points out that there are many exceptions, noting that five percent of adult bilinguals master a second language even though they begin learning it when they are well into adulthood—long after any ...
Developmental linguistics is the study of the development of linguistic ability in an individual, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.It involves research into the different stages in language acquisition, language retention, and language loss in both first and second languages, in addition to the area of bilingualism.