COMPARE AND CONTRAST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Imitation accounts of language acquisition can’t account for the generativity of language. Nativist accounts posit that language would be too...

COMPARE AND CONTRAST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Imitation accounts of language acquisition can’t account for the generativity of language. Nativist accounts posit that language would be too hard to learn without some “pre-programming” of the structure of language in the brain. Nativist approaches are diffi cult to falsify and appear to underestimate both the amount of information that children can use to discover the structure of language from their social environment and their ability to remember patterns in the language they hear. Social pragmatics and general cognitive learning accounts appear to off er the best-supported explanations for how children acquire language.

25. Even very young children use language in ________ways, producing sentences or combinations of words they’ve never heard before. (p. 297 )

26. Noam Chomsky theorized that humans possess a specifi c language “organ” in the brain called the ________ ________ ________ . (p. 300 )