Mentalo-Behaviorist Approach to Language Acquisition

Abstract

Knowledge of language has been one of the most complicated and abstracted concepts human research has come across. Probably no other issue has been investigated in much the same way as human language and its acquisition. So many facts have been discovered, yet, more are still mysterious as to how, when and what factors that contribute to the success or failure of this process (Shormani, 2014). Thus, I present a theoretical account of how language, be it first language (L1) or second language (L2), is acquired. Two most influential theories, namely, Behaviorism and Mentalism, and how each alone fails to account for L1 and L2 acquisition, have been thoroughly discussed. Thus, in this article, I propose a novel theory to language acquisition (LA), based on both the mental properties (the Universal Grammar (UG), i.e. the Initial State of the Language Faculty (=FL) every child is tacitly, innately and biologically endowed with, and environmental properties (the ritualized linguistic and nonlinguistic input the child is exposed to), and name it Mentalo-behaviorist Approach, suggesting, in addition to UG, an Environmental Orienting System (=EOS), which provides the child with the necessary linguistic input, as an Activator/Trigger, whose function is to activate/trigger UG universal properties, for LA process to take place. In the case of L1, EOS functions as an activator with respect to UG principles and as a trigger with respect to its parameters. In the case of L2 acquisition, however, EOS reactivates the former and reactivates and retriggers (resets) the latter. EOS’s activating and triggering in the case of L1 acquisition is due to the fact that the child’s initial state (the “in-built” UG) is still intact, resembling the new bought “computer’s half-installed operating system.” However, in the case of L2 acquisition, EOS’s reactivating and retriggering is because learner’s UG properties have already been involved in acquiring an already exiting language and need to be reactivated and retriggered (i.e. parametric-resetting), fitting the language being acquired. Thus, hypothesizing an equalized (mentalo-behaviorist) portion makes the proposed approach surpass any other existing theory to language acquisition in its two spheres (i.e. L1 and L2).