The contributions of social learning to language acquisition

Abstract Psycholinguists have often lost sight of the functions of language in their search for structural regularities. This paper focuses on three social learning variables whose roles in language development have often been discounted. Feedback or reinforcement has been said to be unrelated to grammatical development since parents tend to reinforce the truth instead of the grammar of their children's utterances. But evidence is presented showing that feedback for the child's comprehension responses can affect production of grammatical forms. Modeling or imitation has been said to be unimportant in grammatical development because most children's utterances are novel and because the frequency of imitation appears unrelated to the rate of language growth. But evidence is presented showing how many utterances can be both imitative and novel and showing that the role of these selective imitations has not been assessed properly in many studies. Contextual constraints on language have been considered unimportant in many psycholinguistic theories. But evidence is presented showing that communicative competence is related critically to the ability to adjust utterances to contextual constraints and that the language of the young child is deficient in this regard. The educational advantages of a functional analysis of language are discussed.