Major Theories in Child Acquisition and The Innate Approach

From studies that have been conducted to look at child language acquisition, three main theories have been constructed that attempt to explain the process. These three are:

• The behavioural approach
• The innate approach
• The interactionist approach

However, we are only going to elaborate on the innate approach.

THE INNATE APPROACH:

The Innate Approach was developed by Noam Chomsky, a well-known and widely respected linguist and cognitive scientist. Chomsky's theory relies on the idea that humans, when born, have a natural predisposition to develop and eventually use language, meaning we are born to communicate with each other.

Chomsky coined the idea that the human brain has a portion of it dedicated to innately processing language so that humans may learn and make use of language to communicate, he called this the 'language acquisition device' or LAD. The innate approach also indicates that while exposure to language is required to being the process of learning language, caregivers are not actively required for the entire process. For example, in certain situations, the caregiver does not have to explain what every word means and the child should have a natural ability to figure out, from previous situations or their experiences similar words, what the caregiver is attempting to communicate.

The innate approach is complementary to the behavioral approach, which theorizes that caregivers must be active in the process of language acquisition. While the interactionist approach is somewhere in between the two.