As a psychologist, Jerome Bruner has led much of modern thought among those labeled interactionists, constructionists, and cognitivists.  As a professor and researcher, Bruner has taught and researched for over sixty years at Harvard, Oxford, and at his current position at New York University.  He has been looked at as one of the instrumental inciters of the so called cognitive revolution, and his ideas have had great influence over the current states of psychology, education, and language.

One frequently cited idea of Bruner’s is the LASS, or Language Acquisition Support System, a term coined in response to Chomsky’s LAD, or Language Acquisition Device.  The LASS refers to the importance of a child’s social support network, which works in conjunction with innate mechanisms to encourage or suppress language development.  Every child has one, and particularly during the years of the language explosion (roughly ages 2 to 5), differences in the LASS significantly explain differences in language acquisition, according to Bruner’s model.

In a spiral curriculum simple subject matter is introduced at the bottom, and made increasingly complex with each revisit

Part of the LASS is another key component of Bruner’s explanation of how the most effective learning occurs – the “spiral curriculum.”  Bruner used the spiral curriculum to argue against the modes of teaching that deem some subjects too difficult for learners to grasp before they’re ready, which was partially in response to Piaget’s strict stages of cogntive development.  Many have come to accept Bruner’s view that learning is more successful with early exposure and subsequent scaffolding of more complex concepts that occurs over earlier developing ones.

So how does a spiral curriculum differ from a traditional one?  Traditionally subjects are taught in big chunks to everyone at the same time.  Spiral curriculums are broken up into smaller chunks which are revisited, moving from exposure to more in-depth understanding with each revisit.  Optimally,this gives greater flexibility for learner’s individual differences, while providing the more opportunities for challenge, creativity, and advanced mastery of subjects.

And, it mimics how we naturally learn language.  A child doesn’t learn his first words in one day sections devoted to each word.  A “Today we’re going to learn the word, doggy.” day would not be as effective as how kids naturally learn the word doggy.  Initial exposures are added to with repeated revisits, increasing a word’s understanding with each revisit.  The most effective learning of subsequent words occurs in the same manner.

Bruner went on to write more on the significance of cultural influences in education.  For more on Bruner and his work, click here or here.  A good article on the spiral curriculum can be found here.

Whether Jerome Kagan has been pulled or thrown himself full bore into the nature-nurture debate, there is no doubt that his work on babies, children, and the development of temperament has greatly influenced both sides of the discussion.  What is in doubt is which side Kagan is on.  His views have both been lauded (a 2002 study published in the Review of General Psychology named Kagan as the 22nd most influential psychologist of the 20th century), and criticized for “blowing in the wind.”   His early work downplayed the significance of early mother-child interaction in lieu of later life experience, which had before Kagan and his contemporaries, been overestimated.  Thus, his initial stance seemed anti-nature.  Later work on the incorrigibility of inborn traits seemed to many to endorse the genetic/nature side.  Specificially, longitudinal studies done by Kagan and colleagues at Harvard have found that of of all infants 20% demonstrate “high reactive” personalities, and of this 20%, roughly two-thirds develop into shy adolescent children.  Lately Kagan has scathingly criticized Judith Rich Harris’s popular dismissal of parental influence on child rearing. 

One main reason for the signficance of Kagan’s work is that it has painted some colorful strokes to the canvass that is reality.  While everyone seems to want Kagan on their side, Kagan has long seemed more interested in discovering the truth.  Perhaps Kagan’s most important contribution is his notion that we seem to inherit a bias toward varied personality dispositions.  Like the personalities of dogs, these biases predispose us toward different temperaments – some dogs are naturally friendly, others are naturally aggressive, and many fall at different points along a continuum between friendliness and aggression.  Especially significant to Kagan’s notion here is that these biases can be overcome.  Under certain environmental influences shy creatures can be “made” more aggressive, while conversely, aggression can be molded into affability.  Our inborn temperaments may make this molding more difficult, but not necessarily impossible.

The implications of this often overlooked point abound.  Research has already strongly suggested that stuttering is the result of a combination of an inclination (or bias) toward stuttering combined with the right environmental factors.  This inclination tugs, but does not guarantee.  Other disorders – such as autism – share many etiological similarities.  Kagan’s descriptions of high-reactive infants may, after further research, prove particularly enlightening to an accepted description of autism’s complex causes.

A good in-depth (albeit somewhat critical) article was published in the Boston Globe in 2004, and can be accessed here.  Much of my information came from a great All in the Mind podcast, which unfortunately is no longer available – although the transcript is here.  An excellent post about Kagan’s recent critique of high rates of psychological diagnosis comes from the Smooth Pebbles blog.

Bandura, Bobo Dolls, and Social Learning 

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And the winner is...?

A once habitually traditional behaviorist, Bandura came up with his own spin on things by introducing children to bobo dolls – inflatable pear shaped balloons, weighted at the bottom to induce them to bounce back when hit.  Specifically, the children were introduced to the dolls after first watching adults hit, scream at, and kick them.  The children surprised no one by then punishing the dolls exactly as the adults had, though they’d been given no instructions to do so.  The fact that the children changed their behavior without rewards suggested the major implication of this study:  observation alone can change behavior, and significantly affect learning.  In many cases observation is the most effective mode of learning, with one obvious example being the enormous impact of peer influence.  Many recent theorists believe we are evolutionarily primed to learn through observation. 

Bandura developed social learning theory in response to this and similar work.  Social learning theory emphasizes that  1) people can learn by observing;  2) specific learning may or may not be associated with an accompanying behavioral change;  3) cognition plays a critical role in learning.  Observation is better at teaching some things, such as morality and aggression, and not as good at teaching other things, such as calculus and physics.  With whatever is being taught, modeling can be one of the most effective components.  Here’s some good info on social learning theory, and here’s a good link on Bandura.

So what does this mean for language learning?  For one thing it provides a good counter argument to the assertion that children do not learn language through imitation.  They do, though because the imitation is often delayed after the observation, it’s hard to detect, and harder still to measure.  One example is when a child uses an adult’s (or a peer’s) cuss word.  When another adult says, “I wonder where he got that?”  the question is usually rhetorical.  The answer is obvious… he got it through observation and functional imitation.

A Summary of Patricia Kuhl’s Work:

Patricia Kuhl is co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.  Her ongoing work, which began in the 1970’s, has altered how modern language theorists view the predisposition to language learning that infants are born with.  Prior to her work most followed the Piagetian view that babies were social isolates not yet ready to learn.  Kuhl’s research has changed this prevailing perception in a number of ways: 

• Human infants, as well as the young of other species such as birds, monkeys, and chinchillas, are born with an ability to distinguish between all sounds that exist in the particular language of that species.
• Human infants lose the ability to distinguish between sounds not in their language at about the same time that they begin producing varied babbling.  Humans have evidently evolved a predisposition toward learning a specific language.
• Parents have evolved specific techniques for teaching language – most prominantly is the high pitched, simplified version of language called “motherese.”  Kuhl’s research has shown a strong positive correlation between a child’s early language acquisition and the amount of “motherese” heard (or “parentese” as Kuhl diplomatically has called it).
• Interaction is crucial.  Babies that are not interacting as much do not learn language nearly as effectively, even if they appear to be attending to caregivers.
• The explosion in language learning that takes place between six months and three years of age in typically developing children seems to be the result of a combination of a child’s innate ability to detect sound differences, a seemingly innate ability to apply computational strategies to make language learning more efficient (Kuhl calls this statistical learning), and a nurturing social setting.

A recent summary of Kuhl’s research backed opinions can be found here.  A very interesting Seattle Times article on Kuhl and her work can be accessed here.

I couldn’t decide on just one more language acquisition study, like I initially wanted to, so I’ll simply give out a few honorable mentions.

Eric Lenneberg and the critical period hypothesis - In 1967 Eric Lennneberg released a widely influential book based on his research popularizing the notion that if language is not learned before an early age – usually estimated at 4 to 6 years – a child’s ability to learn any language becomes greatly compromised, or disappears altogether.  Though this research has been advocated for and debated against by linguistic giants such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, the evidence from Lenneberg and others is flimsy, draws extensively from widely divergent examples of feral children, and is largely theoretical.

Research hasn't proven this chimp knows what's you're thinking

Theory of Mind – Theory of Mind describes the ability to infer the mental states of others.  D.G. Premack and G. Woodruff initally espoused Theory of Mind in their seminal 1978 paper, “Does the Chimpanzee have a theory of mind?”  Research by Wimmer and Perner in 1983 used a famous false belief task to test study participants’ abilities to put themselves in others’ shoes.  Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan M. Leslie, and Uta Frith published research in 1985 suggesting that children with autism have deficits in theory of mind.  Research in this area has been widespread, divergent, and often theoretically powerful. 

Jean Piaget – The study of his own three children formed the basis for much of Piaget’s work.  Not strictly language, per se, but his view of language acquisition was extremely influential, while the middle ground belief (in terms of nature versus nurture) of cognition’s intertwining with language is probably closer to the truth than anything else currently out there.  Good info exists here and here.  This information is especially informative.

I can’t not mention Broca, Vygotsky, or Kegl’s study of Nicaraguan sign language.

Although Everett has been studying the Pirahã (pronounce pee-da-ha) Amazonian tribe, and their unique language since the 1970’s, his work remained relatively obscure until 2005, when an article he’d published on his website was then published in Cultural Anthropology.  According to Everett’s studies, the Pirahã’s language lacks many aspects of language that linguists argue are basic necessities of a universal grammar, such as color concepts, perfect tense, quantity concepts, and numbers over two.  Why?  According to Everett, their hunter-gatherer lifestyles have such little use for these concepts, that words to convey them simply don’t exist.  This research, which overtly repudiates the Chomskyian theory that has dominated the study of language for decades, has been called by Steven Pinker, “A bomb thrown into the party.”

The coverage of this study has greatly expanded recently, exemplified by this New Yorker article.  Language Log has some excellent links concerning the Piraha.

After decades of collaborating to increase child language vocabulary, Betty Hart and Todd Risley spent 2 1/2 years intensely observing the language of 42 families throughout Kansas City.  Specifically, they looked at household language use in three different settings:  1) professional families; 2) working class; 3) welfare families.  Hart and Risley gathered an enormous amount of data during the study and subsequent longitudinal follow-ups to come up with an often cited 30 million word gap between the vocabularies of welfare and professional families by age three.  This number came from the data that showed welfare children heard, on average, 616 words per hour, while children from professional families (essentially children with college educated parents) heard 2153 words per hour.  The longitudinal research in the following years demonstrated a high correlation between vocabulary size at age three and language test scores at ages nine and ten in areas of vocabulary, listening, syntax, and reading comprehension.  This study was subsequently used to fuel the fire of arguments for early childhood programs such as Head Start.

For an excellent summary of this study, read this.  A good comment on this study and poverty’s influence on education can be found here.

Over the next few days I will be describing some of what I feel are the language acquisition studies marked by their significance to both our current knowledge of language acquisition as well as historical impact upon subsequent research in the field.  Without any adieu, and with no particular order, here they are.

image from (http://jean.berko.gleason.googlepages.com/home)

Jean Berko Gleason’s “Wugs”  – 1958

Berko Gleason and colleagues presented pictures of imaginary creatures to children.  The pictures were given labels such as “wug,” made up by the researchers.  The children were then presented with varieties of the make believe creatures to test their ability to apply linguistic rules.  The famous example is “This is a wug.”  (1 wug)  “What are these?”  (More than one.)  Very young children had difficulty, but children by age 4 or 5 could usually label the plural “wugs,” and most importantly – could do it without ever having heard the word used before.  These sorts of pictures were also used to test other aspects of syntax acquisition, such as possessives and verbs.  The nativists have long used this as evidence that language is not memorized.  A shortened explanation of what I think is going on can be found here. 

In an interview found on her website, Berko Gleason gave an eloquent explanation for what she thinks is going on.

I am inclined toward a parsimonious view that sees linguistic behaviour as similar to other behaviour that relies in part on a general cognitive capacity to recognize patterns in input and to generalize. That doesn’t mean that a part of our brain isn’t, at some point, dedicated to language: Babies build their brains, strengthening some connections and pruning others out, based on their experience. The fact that babies can learn to talk and my cat Wolfie can’t means that experience isn’t everything—humans have some genetic capacity to acquire language that cats do not. This is also true of playing the piano and dancing the csardas. But when people talk about language ‘mechanisms’ or ‘hard wiring’ I think we need to remember that these are metaphors, and the human brain may not function like the machines they are based on.

Read more about wugs at this improbable research blog.

Babies can learn!  Elizabeth Bates and Jeffrey Elman published results of their studies showing that eight month old infants were able to learn differences in syllables after two minute exposures.  According to the article published in Science Magazine, the study “…contradicts the widespread belief that humans cannot and do not use generalized statistical procedures to acquire language.”

This and many similar studies indicate that infants may be born with an innate desire to learn language, rather than an innate language faculty.  The article can be found here.

Language theorists have long believed that complex mechanisms are responsible for the language spurt that most young children go through between one and two years of age.  Using computational simulations, researchers from the University of Iowa last year suggested that simpler explanations exist.  These explanations include the fact that children learn many words at the same time, words to be learned are repeated over time, and words vary in difficulty.

More on this story, from 2007, can be found here.