The Roles Of Culture & Biology In Language Acquisition

INTRODUCTION

‘Nature versus nurture’ has been debated around countless dining tables for generations. Some blame the father for the son’s deeds; others remark that apples don’t fall far from trees. The field of linguistics has not been exempt from such discussions. In fact, between the rationalist’s language of the mind and the empiricist’s call for real life, socio-cultural evidence, we could say the topic is central to linguistic studies: how do we, as humans, acquire and use language? Is it part of us from birth - from the womb? Is it genetically and innately passed down to us from our ancestors or built by exposure to the skills of our parents, teachers, and friends? It is agreed by many researchers that there is a critical period for language learning when we are young, specifically before the age of six (Kuhl, 2010), but what happens during those short years is a many-faceted topic with conflicting ideas.

CULTURE

The use of cause and effect in learning processes has been explored frequently. Before Chomsky’s challenges in the 1950s, the Behaviourist belief that outside stimulus engendered specific responses was widely accepted. In particular, psychologist B. F. Skinner put forward the idea of operant conditioning, a pathway that linked initial stimulant to ingrained habit through the idea of consequences (Skinner, 1938). This idea is still explored today in both language learning and teacher training, including the use of the audio-lingual teaching method.

Teaching in the UK has mostly moved away from audio-lingual techniques of modeled statements and memorised drills, but this is not the case in South Korean classrooms. Language acquisition of both their mother tongue and subsequent ones is built on a foundation of set phrases to use in response to given stimuli. The average child begins learning English at a very young age. Nursery school tuition revolves around play overseen by native English speakers. The native speaker models grammatically correct English and encourages the child, with positive reinforcement or amendments, to respond in kind. By first grade, children have memorised phrases from roleplay dialogues or textbooks to build vocabulary in the first instance, but set responses in the second.

There are benefits to beginning with this method of teaching, but the long term effects are worth challenging. Children are able to explore set conversations and have grammatical foundation stones from which to build their knowledge, but conversely, it can be observed through their conversations with native speakers that they get stuck when the script deviates from their expectations. They respond with rote phrases regardless of appropriateness (Hymes, 1972) This is starkly different to those students who lived abroad or actively spent time at home speaking English with their parents, who were able to engage with the language more freely. The use of the language ensured further generation of it. (Donohue, Undated Lecture)

Further to Chomsky’s proposed Language Acquisition Device and his suggestion of a universal, generative grammar, it was noted by Dell Hymes that Chomsky’s theory did not allow for any sociocultural influences (Hymes, 1972) This, Hymes said, means there is a hole in the alleged competence of Chomsky’s ideal speaker: that of knowing when to say what. Hymes argued that the use of introspective evidence did not allow for the understanding of real interaction and risked making generalised assumptions rather than observing real exchanges. Likewise, Pinker believes that children who are unable to have interaction with other language users customarily remain mute; even a one-sided, passive exposure to language is not enough to allow the child to generate. Patricia Kuhl’s research supports this: when babies exposed to audio and TV utterances of Taiwanese doesn’t improve their grasp of the language but the interaction of a present human being does. (Kuhl, 2010). When considering the variant abilities of South Korean children, the need for active social interaction is clear.

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BIOLOGY

Far from Behaviourist ‘blank slate’ concepts, Noam Chomsky suggested that children are born with a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) or universal understanding of grammar already functioning in their brains. This theory holds some weight. Children are frequently able to experiment with phrases and word strings for themselves outside of the input they are exposed to in their environment, which infers that they have an understanding of which words should go where in their utterings. Even when they do receive external feedback, they are unlikely to take it on board - or even notice it happening. (Pinker, 1972)

An example of this can be seen in the video interaction discussed in Part A. In this conversation, a child makes an error in a statement. Her caregiver avoids direct correction, but uses the sentence correctly very shortly after the child’s first attempt. In a subsequent utterance, the child amends with standard grammar, passively absorbing the success of the caregiver’s communication. This provides an incident where biology and culture combine to develop the child’s language use.

That said, there is evidence of gaps in this theory. If children are truly born with an unwritten understanding of universal language, then all they have to do is slot new vocabulary in place as they learn it. (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011 cited in McLeod, 2012). Jean Berko’s research suggests that, despite children generally having a good grasp of categorising unfamiliar words, they did not have a perfect response rate - or anything close. If Chomsky were correct, in theory this would not be the case. (Berko, 1958) Furthermore, Christine Moon and Patricia Kuhl propose that language acquisition actually begins in the womb (Moon et al, 2013), which may mean children have more exposure to language than previously thought and questions whether the innate grammar rules Chomsky supports are truly genetic or whether they are the result of external stimuli.

Further observation of the interaction from Part A shows the child making an error in terms of vocabulary. Initially, it appears that she mishears the word ‘nothing’ as ‘muffin’, but upon realising the true word used, categorises it as a noun rather than a pronoun, saying: ‘we don’t have some nothing today’. This could be due to her mimicking the noun phrase used by another child (Caudwell, 2019) or that she isn’t able to categorise the new word. Pinker suggests that children give phrases more priority than singular words; Sinclair (1991) may indirectly support this claim as he believes the production of a collocate needs only one linguistic decision from the brain as opposed to choosing individual words (cited in Cheng, 2011). Another theory might be that she was primed to categorise ‘nothing’ in that way due to her expectations of the conversation (Schank & Abelson, 1977). She had already asked the boy if he wanted various foodstuffs and received negative responses, finally eliciting the response, ‘I want nothing’ which, to an unfamiliar learner, sounds like a positive by comparison.

CONCLUSION

Both culture and biology make strong impact on the way children acquire language. As demonstrated with the child from Part A’s video, listening to children speak and interact, either with each other or with adults, demonstrates their ability to sort through and categorise new vocabulary and sentence structures and to respond further with unique responses of their own. However, despite this innate skill and the ability to experiment that comes with it, there is always the risk that the meaning can be misconstrued or that a word can be labeled incorrectly. Without human interaction and the cultural examples that those human beings set, a child is unable to test which of their responses is appropriate for a given situation; moreover, they cannot comprehend grammatical statements with ambiguous outcomes unless they have been exposed to the relevant socio-cultural contexts. Caregivers’ use of ‘Motherese’ may be tonally identical no matter the language used, but the responses they expect will differ depending on the environment they are in. In short: biology might provide the skeleton of language, but it is culture that provides the heart.