\'Imitation is critical to child language acquisition\' PDF

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'Imitation is critical to child language acquisition'.

Infants are able to imitate their parents’ facial expressions within the first few days of life, which is supported by skinners imitation theory. It’s important to make eye contact with your newborn and show your facial expressions so they can learn to make them too. Babies start making vocal interactions when they’re 4-5 months old especially instinctive ones, where they make noises to accommodate to their needs. That’s when they begin cooing, crying and babbling. The more you talk to them, the more they’ll try to imitate the sounds, which is then an example of bilabial noises. These are the early building blocks of language which are backed up by Vygotsky theory that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition. By the time babies are 8 months old, they’ll start copying familiar gestures such as clapping and waving. The more you clap, wave and share other similar gestures or actions with your baby, the more likely it is your baby will imitate you and make these actions themselves. This is supported by one of Piaget's four primary development stages, which is the first one sensorimotor stage, where intelligence takes the form of motor actions i.e. pointing a finger, waving etc. Behaviourist theorists like Skinner said that children acquire language through imitation. He conducted research on rats and pigeons which led him to believe that language was just another form of learned behaviour. This brought him to the conclusion that children learn language through nurture rather than it being biologically programmed (Piaget) or their genetic inheritance (Chomsky) as other theorists say. In Text A there are prime examples of child language development (CLD). One of these examples is when Leila says, “I’ve got sticky hands” and Jan replies, “You got sticky hands again (1.0)”. These lines are supported by Skinner's theory of positive reinforcement. He proposed that if a child has been positively reinforced i.e. Jan repeating what Leila said, then they're more likely to repeat that behaviour or the case of (CLD) those words because by Jan repeating what Leila said she’s implicating that what Leila said was correct. Another example of Skinner's positive reinforcement being present in the text is when Leila says, “They are big chair” and Jan says,

“They ARE big chairs”. Here we can also see that Jan is confirming that what Leila is saying is correct and there’s also the hint that the word ‘ARE’ is in a different pitch so Jan may be saying ‘are’ in an exaggerated intonation to maybe show that she’s proud that Leila said the statement about chairs correctly, which in the future may give Leila the confidence to speak this way again. On one line Leila is watching ‘In the night garden’, a children's TV show and she starts to imitate what the character Iggle piggle saying in his voice, “I’ve got sticky hands”. This not only backs up skinners theory of imitation but it also supports Haliday’s imaginative function where children begin using their imagination to pretend they’re someone or something else and most of the time playing dress up or pretend tends to be the imitation of something or someone. In order for Leila to have known what sticky hands were, she had to have heard the phrase from somewhere i.e. from TV hence skinners explanation on imitation is backed up by the fact that children learn through imitation, whether it’s in real life or most of the time from TV or the media. However, there weren't only just examples of positive reinforcement in this text there was also use of recasting, which is when an adult corrects a child when they have said something incorrectly, but the correction is done in a way that doesn’t then discourage the child from further speaking (negative reinforcement). To recast an error the speaker must repeat the error back to the learner in a corrected form. For instance, when Leila says, “They all wight” Jan corrects Leila's mistakes, “They’re all right ”. So this is supported by Vygotsky theory that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition. He stated that development depends on the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which is a level of development attained when children engage in social behaviour and in this case the social behaviour being displayed in the text is of Leila and Jan’s conversation. With Jan having subtly corrected Leila’s pronunciation, Leila will be less likely to omit the ‘r’ in right and is more likely to imitate what Jan has said instead. The statement that imitation is crucial to children’s early language acquisition is supported by Skinner’s theory of imitation and reinforcement. However, the other side of the nurture argument is nature. The theorists who say that language is acquired through nature believes that language is preprogrammed into a child's genetic inheritance. This is the opposite of the imitation theory, where they thought that language is acquired after a child is

born. The Nativist theorists believe that children have an inbuilt language acquisition device (LAD) that enables them to use the exact rules of their particular language i.e grammatical rules. Chomsky believed in this theory and challenged Skinner's theory of imitation. He said that if children are imitating their parents, why are they making virtuous errors i.e. when a child says ‘I runned’? Adults don’t make these types of errors, therefore children are not just imitating what parents/carers/other adults are saying. And even if children were imitating their parents it still doesn’t mean they understand the semantics of language. Chomsky also found out that that LAD can only be activated with sufficient input before a certain time, after this time their language acquisition will be impaired. The cases of feral children such as Genie supports this theory where children after the age of puberty struggle to acquire language as they have passed the critical period stage. In conclusion, although imitation does help a child with language acquisition, it isn't critical or essential to a child’s language development not as much as say, social interaction to help activate their LAD....