Ethodological Theory

Ethological Theory
 stresses that behavior is strongly influenced by biology and is tied of evolution
 characterized by critical or sensitive periods.
 these are specific time frames during which, according to ethologists, the presence or absence of certain experiences has a long-lasting influence on individuals.
Konrad Lorenz
(1903-1989)
• European zoologist
• helped bring ethology to prominence what is ethology?
 1. study of the behaviour of animals in their normal environment (Collins Dictionary, 2010) noun  2. study of animal behavioral patterns: the study of the behavior of animals in their natural habitat, usually proposing evolutionary explanations (Encarta Dictionaries, 2009)
Lorenz’s experiment
1. studied the behavior of greylag geese, which will follow their mothers as soon as they hatch.
2. He separated the eggs laid by one goose into two groups. > one group he returned to the goose to be hatched by her. > the other group was hatched in an incubator
3. He marked the goslings and then placed both groups under a box. Mother goose and "mother" lorenz stood aside as the box lifted.
Each group of goslings went directly to its "mother." lorenz called this process imprinting.
Imprinting….
 It is the rapid, innate learning that involves attachment to the first moving objects seen.
Contributions of ethological theory
1. focus on the biological and evolutionary basis of development
2. the use of careful observations in naturalistic settings
Criticisms
1. too much emphasis on biological foundations
2. a belief that the critical and sensitive period concepts might be too rigid.
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best known and the most influential linguist of the second half of the Twentieth Century. He has made a number of strong claims about language : in particular, he suggests that language is an innate faculty - that is to say that we are born with a set of rules about language in our heads which he refers to as the 'Universal Grammar'. The universal grammar is the basis upon which all human languages build. If a Martian linguist were to visit Earth, he would deduce from the evidence that there was only one language, with a number of local variants. Chomsky gives a number of reasons why this should be so. Among the most important of these reasons is the ease with which children acquire their mother tongue. He claims that it would be little short of a miracle if children learnt their language in the same way that they learn mathematics or how to ride a bicycle. This, he says, is because :
1. Children are exposed to very little correctly formed language. When people speak, they constantly interrupt themselves, change their minds, make slips of the tongue and so on. Yet children manage to learn their language all the same.
2. Children do not simply copy the language that they hear around them. They deduce rules from it, which they can then use to produce sentences that they have never heard before. They do not learn a repertoire of phrases and sayings, as the behaviourists believe, but a grammar that generates an infinity of new sentences.
1. 2. Children are born, then, with the Universal Grammar wired into their brains. This grammar offers a certain limited number of possibilities - for example, over the word order of a typical sentence.
Some languages have a basic SVO structure The teacher gave a lecture
S V O
75% of the world's languages use either this (English, French, Vietnamese) or SOV (Japanese, Tibetan, Korean) - others prefer VSO (10 - 15% - Welsh) or VOS (Malagasy) * Some languages, such as Latin, appear to have free word order, but even here, SOV is very common. OSV is very rare - but you will find an example in the speech of Yoda, in Star Wars. When the child begins to listen to his parents, he will unconsciously recognise which kind of a language he is dealing with - and he will set his grammar to the correct one - this is known as 'setting the parameters'.
It is as if the child were offered at birth a certain number of hypotheses, which he or she then matches with what is happening around him. He knows intuitively that there are some words that behave like verbs, and others like nouns, and that there is a limited set of possibilities as to their ordering within the phrase. This is not information that he is taught directly by the adults that surround him, but information that is given. It is as if the traveller were provided at the beginning of his journey with a compass and an astrolabe.
This set of language learning tools, provided at birth, is referred to by Chomsky as the Language Acquisition Device . (Notice that he uses the term "acquisition" rather than learning). How did you learn to speak your native language? Notice, this shouldn't be such a puzzling question. We often ask questions such as, do you remember when did you learned to tie your shoes, ride a bike, and eat with a fork. Sometimes we can remember because a parent helped us learn how to do these things. Now, since we always speak the language of our parents, they must have helped us learn to speak our first language. But do you remember when your mother taught you the past tense? When your father laid down the rules for passive sentences? We don't remember these important moments of our childhood because they never occurred.
Our parents didn't teach us how to walk and they didn't teach us how to talk. Yet we learned from them. How can this be? Certainly there must have been a subtle, perhaps intuitive teaching process that neither our parents nor we were aware of. We begin by imitating what we hear our parents say as best we can, repeating random phrases. Our parents in subtle ways punish us for the childish speech errors we make (by not responding, correcting the error, etc.) and reward correct phrases (by responding positively). As our speech improves, our parents respond more positively and less negatively. No?
First, let's examine the assumption that children begin speaking by trying to repeat what they have heard their parents say. Have you ever heard a child say things like this:
1a Daddy go
1b He hitted me
1c No eat cake
Who did they hear utter such phrases? Daddy go is an attempt to express 'Daddy is going'. But if the child were merely trying to repeat this common phrase, choosing random two-word combinations, he or she would also occasionally say Daddy is or simply is going? Yet these two phrases do not occur as normal speech errors of children while Daddy go is a common one.
Second, research shows that while mothers often respond to the semantic content of what their children say ('No, that's not a doggie, it's a cow'), they very rarely respond to the grammatical status of their children's phrases. Indeed, when parents do respond to speech errors, they most often respond positively. Here are a few advanced errors from the history of my family. What do you think our response was—correction or laughter (which I take to be a positive response)? 2a. Mama, mama, there's a tree-knocker in the back yard!
2b. It's raining, where is the underbrella?
2c. Give me the beach-lookers! (binoculars) In fact, parents themselves make grammatical errors when they speak. Despite the fact that children don't know when their parents are speaking grammatically and when they are making errors, all children grow up knowing (if not always speaking) the language perfectly.
So how do we learn to speak? Take a look at example No. 1b above for a clue. Although hitted is not a word children hear adults utter, it is wrong for an interesting reason: the verb, in a sense, has the 'right' ending on it for the past tense. In other words, the only way a child learning language could make such an error is that he or she is learning a rule that derives past tense verbs from verb stems. What the child hasn't mastered at this stage is the exceptions to the rule. Notice also that the words in the erroneous phrases are all in the correct order. No child would say go Daddy for 'Daddy is going' cookie mommy for 'Mommy's cookie'. By the time a child begins putting two words together, he or she has already mastered the basic rules of syntax and applies them correctly even in their erroneous speech. It takes the child a little longer to master the rules of morphology.
The evidence then indicates that children do, in fact, absorb a massive number of sentences and phrases but rather than parrot them back, they abstract rules from them and create their own grammar which they then apply to create new utterances they have never heard before. Over the years from 2-7, when language is mastered, children constantly adjust their grammar until it matches that of the adult speaker population.
This critical period between the ages of 2-7 suggests that (first) language learning, like walking, is an innate capacity of human beings triggered by a level of development more than feedback from the environment. That is, so long as a child hears a language-any language-when they reach this critical period they will learn it perfectly. If this is true, any child not hearing language during this period not only should not learn to speak but also should not be able to learn to speak. The ethical implications of research on this question are obvious. However, there have been a few tragic non-scientific bits of evidence that supports the innateness + critical period hypothesis. If I wanted to start the course off with a silly pun, I could say 'Learning a language is a child's game'. But perhaps it is more accurate to say 'Creating a language is a child's game'. Let us look at an example of how a language may be created :
Pidgin
• - reduced syntax and vocabulary
• - often no fixed order of words, with considerable variation from one speaker to another
• - used purely as a language of communication o - not lived in o - no-one speaks a pidgin as a mother tongue
But a pidgin can become a language - Creole. How does this happen?
According to Derek Bickerton, who has reconstructed the process of creolisation in Hawaii, it takes one generation.
When children begin to use a pidgin, they automatically enrich the vocabulary and the syntax - it becomes a full language. The community of young children in Hawaii took the pidgin used by their parents - workers from China, Japan, Korea, Portugal, the Philippines and Puerto Rico - and created a language.
According to the followers of the American linguist, Noam Chomsky, this can stand as an emblem for what the process of acquiring a language consists in - at least for a mother tongue. The child does not learn the language, but creates it anew.
Does this have anything to tell us about learning a foreign language? Chomsky's critics
Those linguists who do not agree with Chomsky point to several problems, of which I shall mention just four.
1. Chomsky differentiates between competence and performance. Performance is what people actually say, which is often ungrammatical, whereas competence is what they instinctively know about the syntax of their language - and this is more or less equated with the Universal Grammar. Chomsky concentrates upon this aspect of language - he thus ignores the things that people actually say. The problem here is that he relies upon people's intuitions as to what is right or wrong - but it is not at all clear that people will all make the same judgements, or that their judgements actually reflect the way people really do use the language.
2. Chomsky distinguishes between the 'core' or central grammar of a language, which is essentially founded on the UG, and peripheral grammar. Thus, in English, the fact that 'We were' is considered correct, and 'We was ' incorrect is a historical accident, rather than an integral part of the core grammar - as late as the 18th Century, recognised writers, such as Dean Swift, could write 'We was ...' without feeling that they had committed a terrible error. Similarly, the outlawing of the double negation in English is peripheral, due to social and historical circumstances rather than anything specific to the language itself. To Chomsky, the real object of linguistic science is the core grammar. But how do we determine what belongs to the core, and what belongs to the periphery? To some observers, all grammar is conventional, and there is no particular reason to make the Chomskian distinction.
3. Chomsky also appears to reduce language to its grammar. He seems to regard meaning as secondary - a sentence such as 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously' may be considered as part of the English language, for it is grammatically correct, and therefore worthy of study by Transformational Grammarians. A sentence such as 'My mother, he no like bananas', on the other hand, is of no interest to the Chomskian linguist. Nor would he be particularly interested in most of the utterances heard in the course of a normal lecture.
4. Because he disregards meaning, and the social situation in which language is normally produced, he disregards in particular the situation in which the child learns his first language.

While the term sociobiology can be traced to the 1940s, the concept of sociobiology first gained major recognition with Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 publication Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. In it, he introduced the concept of sociobiology as the application of evolutionary theory to social behavior.
Sociobiology is based on the premise that some behaviors are at lease partly inherited and can be affected by natural selection. It begins with the idea that behaviors have evolved over time, similar to the way that physical traits are thought to have evolved. Animals will therefore act in ways that have proven to be evolutionarily successful over time, which can result in the formation of complex social processes, among other things.
According to sociobiologists, many social behaviors have been shaped by natural selection. Sociobiology investigates social behaviors such as mating patters, territorial fights, and pack hunting. It argues that just as selection pressure led to animals evolving useful ways of interacting with the natural environment, it also led to the genetic evolution of advantageous social behavior. Behavior is therefore seen as an effort to preserve one’s genes in the population and certain genes or gene combinations are thought to influence particular behavioral traits from generation to generation.
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection explains that traits less adapted to particular conditions of life will not endure in a population because organisms with those traits tend to have lower rates of survival and reproduction. Sociobiologists model the evolution of human behaviors in much the same way, using various behaviors as the relevant traits. In addition, they add several other theoretical components to their theory.
Sociobiologists believe that evolution includes not just genes, but also psychological, social, and cultural features. When humans reproduce, offspring inherit the genes of their parents, and when parents and children share genetic, developmental, physical, and social environments, the children inherit the gene-effects of their parents. Sociobiologists also believe that the different rates of reproductive success are related to different levels of wealth, social status, and power within that culture.
Example of Sociobiology in Practice
One example of how sociobiologists use their theory in practice is through the study of sex-role stereotypes. Traditional social science assumes that humans are born with no innate predispositions or mental contents and that sex differences in children’s behavior is explained by the differential treatment of parents who hold sex-role stereotypes. For example, giving girls baby dolls to play with while giving boys toy trucks, or dressing little girls in only pink and purple while dressing boys in blue and red.
Sociobiologists, however, argue that babies do have innate behavioral differences, which trigger the reaction by parents to treat boys one way and girls another way. Further, females with low status and less access to resources tend to have more female offspring while females with high status and more access to resources tend to have more male offspring. This is because a woman’s physiology adjusts to her social status in a way that affects both the sex of her child and her parenting style. That is, socially dominant women tend to have higher testosterone levels than others and their chemistry makes them more active, assertive, and independent than other women. This makes them more likely to have male children and also to have a more assertive, dominant parenting style.
Critiques of Sociobiology
Like any theory, sociobiology has its critics. One critique of the theory is that it is inadequate to account for human behavior because it ignores the contributions of the mind and culture. A second critique of sociobiology is that it relies on genetic determinism, which implies approval of the status quo. For example, if male aggression is genetically fixed and reproductively advantageous, critics argue, then male aggression seems to be a biologic reality in which we have little control.