Is it important to a second language acquisition for a child to have a fully developed first language?

Question

according to skinner's theory of language development or refere to Jane piaget's theory

Answer 1

My experience is that from the cradle children learn. Our kids spoke a little later than monolingual children, but they started with two languages. My wife speaks one language as her native language and I speak another. We both speak the other's language as a second language. We raised our children with the language that came out of our hearts.

Neither B.F. Skinner nor Jean Piaget.

Answer 2

The critical stage of language acquisition is 0-3, during this time children's brains will learn to decode and process language, and they will learn to produce language to communicate their basic wants and needs. Language is how one learns in life, if you are unable to understand or use language, learning will be much more difficult. I work with language delayed preschoolers, and most have delays with social skills, and academic skills in addition to expressive and/or receptive language abilities. I don't know exactly what you're looking for from your question, but language is at the core of learning. Most children with learning disabilities have some sort of language delay as well.

Answer 3

Absolutely not. I grew up speaking English with my father, French with my mother and Arabic with the local kids - we were living in North Africa at the time. My brother's children grew up speaking English, French and Portuguese, my children English, French and Spanish. Every last one of us went to Higher Education and studied everything from Physics to Music. It is a myth put forward by the linguistically lazy that it hurts children's development. By the way, all my family pick up languages like sponges. I think it makes the mind more adaptable. It takes children very little time to realise that they just don't use the words that some people don't understand. My biggest problem was that I had a Welshwoman teaching French at school and I couldn't understand a word she said because her accent was so thick!

Answer 4

It depends upon what age they are. The window of aquisition (as in being able to "absorb" a language naturally) usually starts closing somewhere between 6 and 9 years of age. After that, the child switches to "language learning" which requires learning from a teacher or with help in their native language (consulting a dictionary, etc.).

Answer 5

No, children can learn different languages simultaneously. My children grew up in a German speaking environment with me constantly speaking English with them. They are both totally bilingual now. It might have taken them a little longer than other kids to start speaking and be fluent, but once they got started they were fluent in both languages at once.

Answer 6

I lived in Spain for many years and from my experience, if given the right support, young children can absorb two languages simultaneously with relative ease. If it is before they get settled into habits with their language then I believe that it is simply the norm for them to be using two languages.

Answer 7

A basic assumption of Skinner's was that all language, including private, internal discourse, was a behavior that developed in the same manner as other skills. He believed that a sentence is merely part of “a behavior chain, each element of which provides a conditional stimulus for the production of the succeeding element” (Fodor, Bever, & Garrett, p25). The probability of a verbal response was contingent on four things: reinforcement, stimulus control, deprivation, and aversive stimulation. The interaction of these things in a child’s environment would lead to particular associations, the basis of all language.

Skinner proposed that language could be categorized by the way it was reinforced. He claimed that there were four general types of speech: echoic behavior, mand, tact, interverbals and autoclitic.

Though a tribute to the behaviorist paradigm, Skinner’s book generated more questions and concerns than it explained.

After his book was published and critiqued by Noam Chomsky, Skinner failed to respond immediately to the issues and problems raised. His slow response coupled with both a growing disdain for the behaviorist paradigm and the influence of technology, computers, and information processing led to the strengthening of the cognitive movement in psychology and other social sciences.

Jean Piaget was interested in how children reacted to their environment, he proposed a more active role for them than that suggested by learning theory. He envisioned a child's knowledge as composed of schemas, basic units of knowledge used to organize past experiences and serve as a basis for understanding new ones.

Schemas are continually being modified by two complementary processes that Piaget termed assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation refers to the process of taking in new information by incorporating it into an existing schema. In other words, people assimilate new experiences by relating them to things they already know. On the other hand, accommodation is what happens when the schema itself changes to accommodate new knowledge. According to Piaget, cognitive development involves an ongoing attempt to achieve a balance between assimilation and accommodation that he termed equilibration.

The most significant alternative to the work of Piaget has been the information-processing approach, which uses the computer as a model to provide new insight into how the human mind receives, stores, retrieves, and uses information. Researchers using information-processing theory to study cognitive development in children have focused on areas such as the gradual improvements in children's ability to take in information and focus selectively on certain parts of it and their increasing attention spans and capacity for memory storage. For example, researchers have found that the superior memory skills of older children are due in part to memorization strategies, such as repeating items in order to memorize them or dividing them into categories.

So given what has been attested to in the other answers, you can draw the conclusion that perhaps Jean Piaget's Theory was closer than Skinner's Theory.

Answer 8

Perhaps. My first language is english but I left the country at 8.
Have spoken french all my life virtually. But it just doesn't feel like my mother tongue and my english isn't that good either.
So yeah, to have a solid first language is good IMO.

Answer 9

No. Both my kids learnt English and Greek together and are now completely bi-lingual. They are like sponges and have no difficulty learning two or even More languages,

Answer 10

Yes, but it takes a lot of work and remember that one language will always be dominant, although they can interchange.