Historical Perspectives: Interacting Theories

Indiana Ayu

Background

Empiricism Mentalism

Parole & Langue

Vs

The Theories Development

Structuralism Behaviourist Mentalism

Universal GrammarConnectionismThe Utterance

Schema

STRUCTURALISM (1933)

• Proposed by Leonard Bloomfield

• Language should be scientific

• Only an analysis based on ‘real data’ could be considered scientific.

• This kind of analysis is labelled ‘empiricism’

Emphasized the importance of

the basic structures &

relationships of that particular

object.

Semantic Triangle or Triad

Theory of Meaning (1923):

referent – mental image -

words

BEHAVIOURISM (1957)

• Proposed by B. F. Skinner

• It assumes that human mind should be based on people’s actions & behavior

• No consideration of internal mental states.

• Learner is essentially passive & their behaviors are shaped through positive & negative reinforcement.

• Learning is seen as product of teaching: conditioning and habit formation

MENTALISM (1959)

• Proposed by Chomsky• Language can not only

be explained by just looking at observable facts

• The observable data are inadequate and incomplete

• Children never learn their first language purely by habit formation

• Language Acquisition Device (LAD): deep structure & surface structure

Look at these sentences:1) John is easy to please2) John is eager to please

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (1980)

access

activate

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

DEVICE

NATURAL LANGUE

Children innate knowledge of

language

Language Faculty

(Chomsky, 2002)

CONNECTIONISM (1996)

• Proposed by Freeman• Rejecting the

hypothesis of innate endowment

• Elman et al (1996) agree that there are universal behaviors, but that does not mean that they are directly contained in our genes.

• Language learning is understood as the processing of experience and the repetition of experiences causing the strengthening of the connections. (Menezes, ___)

It’s SLA results from increasing strengths of associations between stimuli & responses

It seeks to explain human intelectual abilities by using

computer simulations of

neural networks.

UTTERANCE SCHEMA (2000)

• Proposed by Tomasello• Children learn the rules

of language from the input they get.

• The creativity & emerging complexity occurs slowly as they begin to recognize patterns.

• Usage-based syntactic operations

• It assumes that child has a general learning mechanism that enables him/her to recognize patterns in utterances & build rules for his/her own language

References• Alwasilah, Chaedar. (1993). Linguistik Suatu

Pengantar. Bandung: Angkasa.• Bot, Kees de., Lowie, Wander., Verspoor, Marjolijn.

(2005). Second Language Acquisition: An Advanced Resource Book. New York: Routledge

• Fromkin, Victoria., Rodman, Robert., Collins, Peter., Blair, David. (1984). An Introduction to Language. New South Wales: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

• http://www.learning-theories.com/behaviorism.html• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism

Thank you