Developmental Perspectives

The reading this week gave a brief insight into the developmental sequences and milestones during the first few years of life. The chapter introduced three major perspectives that may help explain how language is acquired and developed. The three perspectives that were addressed were the behaviorist perspective, the innatist perspective and the interactionist/developmental perspective. Contributions from key theorists such as F.B Skinner, Chomsky, Vygotsky and Piaget were included on the different perspectives. Each perspective presented its own strengths and weaknesses. The chapter also covered over aspects such as the importance of interaction, childhood bilingualism and language disorders and delays (Lightbown et al., 1999). The aspect that I found the most …show more content…
I also frequently applied this grammatical rule to irregular verbs. Through extensive feedback from my teachers and other native French speakers, I was able to reduce my grammatical mistakes but still made a few errors during conversations. During my years in university, I also took an interest in learning Spanish. Although Spanish and French share similarities I found that I had an easier experience learning a foreign language, French, at a younger age. Ease of language learning has been attributed to the critical period hypothesis. There have been numerous studies contributed to the critical period hypothesis and its role in language acquisition. A study that tested the critical period hypothesis found that the degree of second language success in immigrants steadily declines as they aged. However, this decline is dependent on more factors than age. Factors such as age of immigration, years of formal education and socioeconomic status are all equally essential in predicting the success of an immigrant learning a second language. Additionally, the researchers suggested that the decline in success may be attributed to