SUMMARY

      Children deprived of linguistic input show a clear drive to acquire language and may even create a rudimentary linguistic system. A common misconception about language acquisition is that children simply listen to what is said around them and imitate the speech they hear but children’s not simply imitate adult speech they require a language environment to develop a mature linguistic system, some mechanisms to account for language acquisition. 

A proposal in the behavior tradition is that children learn to produce correct (grammatical) sentences because adults positively reinforce them when they say something grammatical and negatively reinforce them by correction when they say some ungrammatical. It has also been suggested that children put words together to form phrases and sentences by analogy; by hearing a sentence using is as a model to form other sentences. In some sense this must be true. The problem with analogy is that the child must also know when the general rule does not work, as one developmental psycholinguist explain. Children do not make syntactic errors of this sort. They make overgeneralize a morphological rule or omit functional elements. But they seem to know enough about syntactic structure not to assign a uniform analysis to sentences. Reinforcement theory of motivation was proposed by BF Skinner and his associates. It states that individual’s behavior is a function of its consequences. This theory focuses totally on what happens to an individual when he takes some action. 

Imitation, reinforcement, and analogy cannot account for language development because they are based on the (implicit or explicit) assumption that what the child acquires is a set of sentences or forms rather than a set of grammatical rules and linguistic structures. 

Approximately half of the people in the world are native speakers of more than one language, this means that as children they had regular and continued exposure to various languages. In early studies of bilingualism, this kind of language mixing was viewed negatively. Indeed, various researchers have claimed that language mixing in bilingual children is similar to codeswitching used by many adult bilinguals.

The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to acquire each without influence from the other. They also seem to have better metalinguistic awareness, which refers to a speaker’s conscious awareness about language rather than of language. More recent research indicates that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in certain kinds of problem solving.

Finally, bilingual children have sufficient metalinguistic awareness to speak the contextually appropriate language, as noted earlier.