Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video I
talked about this idea of a critical period for language acquisition and this
is the idea that if children aren't exposed to language prior to about the
age of seven then they're unable to develop full linguistic fluency in any
language. Now this idea brings us to consider the role of the environment on
language development. So it's not just the case that we have a genetic
predisposition for language and it just emerges, but we need to have the correct
environment in order to realize that full potential. This brings us to
consider the role of the social environment more carefully when it comes
to language acquisition and this brings us to what's called an interactionist
approach to language acquisition. The interactionist approach
recognizes that we seem to have a genetic predisposition for language
acquisition that other animals don't have but that we also have a social
environment that plays an important role in the full development of language
ability. So when we think about the way the children develop language, it's not
the case that they simply sit there listening to adults talk and then one
day they jump into the conversation, right? Instead we see that there's this
process of development and adults and even other children are actively
involved in shaping that development. It's also the case that children aren't
simply learning language, right? They're not just learning vocabulary and
syntactical rules, right? They're learning how to interact with others and they're
learning how to communicate. So this brings us to what a researcher named
Jerome Bruner referred to as the language acquisition support system and
this was in contrast to Chomsky's language acquisition device, the
idea of this genetic predisposition. So Bruner suggests we have this language
acquisition support system; these are the features of the social environment that
help language ability to emerge. So it's not the case that adults simply
talk and children listen and then they develop language but adults do things
like direct the child's attention to certain things, so they tell a
child what to focus on and they ask questions to the child and then they
label things. So they point things out and "say this is a dog" "this is a cat"
and they provide feedback when the child makes mistakes. So when the child
has learned the word dog and then later sees a cat and points to it and says dog
the adult can say "no, actually this is a cat and they're similar but they're, you
know, we use different words for these". And so this provides this support system
or this scaffolding that allows the language to develop more fully. Okay, so
another thing that's different with the way that adults interact with children
is that they don't speak to them like adults right? You are probably aware
of this yourself anytime you found yourself talking to a young child you
probably find that you talk differently, right? You adjust your language use in
order to help the child to understand and to help the child to develop his or
her own language ability. This is often referred to as motherese or
caregiver talk or baby talk and this is a common feature in all sorts of
languages; that adults don't talk to children the same way they talk to other
adults. This is part of this environment that's helping the child to
develop language ability and helping the child to communicate. So when we think
about this interactionist approach, one of the best examples of the role of the
social environment on language acquisition comes from Nicaragua in the
mid-1980s. So what happened was that a new deaf school was created in Managua,
the capital, and children from remote villages were brought together and the
goal was to teach them a formal sign language because what happened was a lot
of children who were in remote villages who were deaf, they didn't have a full
language around them, they didn't have exposure to a full grammatically-complex
sign language, so they had simple gestures and they could communicate with
family and friends but they weren't really being exposed to complex
language use. So the hope was bring all of these children together and then
teach them a formal sign language and this would be a great improvement for
them. One of the problems that they had was the children actually didn't
seem to want to learn the formal sign language. What happened was the
formal sign language was just too slow. If you take a bunch of children who want
to interact and communicate with one another and you put them all together
they're gonna find a way to communicate and they weren't going to wait around
until, you know, three months from now we're gonna learn how to talk about some
particular thing. "'I want to talk about it right now."
So the children essentially invented their own sign language in order to
communicate with one another and initially this was dismissed as being
mimicry or miming or you know really simple gestures or slang or
something like that. And it turns out that it actually was a
full language and it developed the full grammatical complexity and syntactical
rules of any other language. This shows us this role
of the social environment in helping with this language development. This
language didn't emerge in these isolated cases where you had children in
a remote village but put enough of them together where they want to interact and
they want to communicate and that social environment will allow language to
emerge. Now this also demonstrates the critical period that I mentioned before
because children who were over the age of seven were not able to develop full
linguistic fluency in this new language but children who were younger than this,
who were exposed to this new language, were able to develop full fluency just
like anybody else who's exposed to their native language. Okay, I hope you found
this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more!
Thanks for watching!