The role of cognitive development and linguistic input in language acquisition

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a cognitivist reaction against previous views of language learning. It had been held that mere exposure to language is a sufficient condition for language acquisition, whether by hypothesis testing (Katz 1966) or through passive learning (Braine 1971). Symptomatic of this approach were experiments investigating the learning of grammar in which subjects were taught artificial miniature languages without meaning, either through making guesses and receiving feedback from the experimenter (e.g. Hunt 1965) or passively, just by listening (Braine 1971). Although no such claim was explicitly made, language learning was actually treated as if it occurred independently of cognitive development. This one-sided approach has since been corrected by the cognitivists as represented in particular by the Geneva school (Sinclair 1971), who stress the importance of general cognitive development in language acquisition. Experiments with artificial languages bear the imprint of this approach and now involve semantic referents of the linguistic symbols (e.g. Moeser & Bregman 1972, 1973).