linguistic analysis - Professor Binkert's Webpage - Oakland University

1.3 THEORIES OF NATIVE LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
There are several popular myths about how children acquire their native language. The first and
perhaps most common is that children acquire their native language because parents and care-givers
teach it to them. At this point, it should be abundantly clear that such is not the case. We have
considered a wide variety of facts about English grammar, and it is safe to say that the average native
speaker is not consciously aware of any of them. Asking English speakers how to form the past
tense of English verbs or how to form a question in English will elicit responses which are largely
inaccurate, if not silly. Clearly, if people do not consciously understand the rules necessary to
produce grammatical English sentences, they cannot teach those rules to their children. Even when
parents do know what the rules are, it is useless to try to teach such rules to children. Children are
acquiring the rules of their native language at a time when they lack the cognitive capacity to discuss
those rules. Children do not compare notes about grammatical rules with their playmates.
Another myth about native language acquisition is that children acquire their language because they
need to or because they derive pleasure from it. It is impossible to substantiate such an idea. The
needs and pleasures of one child are often substantially different from those of another child, yet
native language acquisition is remarkably uniform across children. The fact is that native language
acquisition is involuntary and obligatory. One can choose not to learn to read and write, though one
will have difficulty functioning in society with that choice. But there is no child who wakes up one
day and consciously decides not to acquire the language to which he or she has been accidentally
exposed. We do not find some children who really enjoy acquiring English and, therefore, become
English junkies, accelerate their maturation, and acquire all of English in a few months.
Generally speaking, there have been two broad philosophical and psychological theories about native
language acquisition. One theory is called EMPIRICISM (BEHAVIORISM, NURTURISM).
It was first proposed by the philosophers John Locke (1632-1704), George Berkeley (1685-1753),
and David Hume (1711-1776). The empiricist approach claims that human beings are born with
very little in the way of instinctive behavior, that is, they are born with very little in the way of innate
mechanisms for acquiring knowledge about language or anything else. Most of what they come to
know is a product of their experiences with the physical and social world. Human beings learn by
imitating, associating, repeating, generalizing, and so on.
The other theory is called RATIONALISM (MENTALISM, NATIVISM). It was first proposed
by the philosophers Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), and Gottfried
Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716). The rationalist approach claims that human beings are born with
a rich and detailed system of innate mechanisms which determine the way in which they acquire
knowledge and interpret the data of everyday experience.
Nowadays, most linguists take a rationalist approach to language acquisition acknowledging, at the
same time, that the environment plays a crucial role in activating, validating, and automatizing the
process. It is well-known that children who grow up in loving, nurturing environments fare better
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