Towards a cognitive-environmental theory of language acquisition
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Abstract
Every comprehensive analysis of language acquisition should account for three different issues and specify their relationships: 1) the changing environment to which children are exposed during their development, 2) the characteristics of cognitive processes used by children to analyse the adults’ language and the inferences from which the y derive gramatical rules, and 3) children ‘s comprehension and production behavior at different moments of language development.
These paper deals primarily with the first issue, and to a lesser extent with the second. The effects of vocabulary and morpitosyntactic simplification and adaptation of the
language used by parents when addressing children are discussed. It is suggested that language is taught under such conditions in an implicit ,manner.
Finally, some cognitive processes necessary for language development in children are identfied, and some research strategies for the study of such processes are suggested.