Summarize current theoretical views on how children acquire grammar

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Evidence that grammatical development is an extended, learned process, beginning with knowledge of specific instances and building toward general categories and rules, has raised questions about Chomsky's nativist account. Some experts have concluded that grammar is a product of general cognitive development—children's tendency to search for consistencies and patterns of all sorts.
According to one view, young children rely on other properties of language to detect basic grammatical regularities. In semantic bootstrapping, for example, they use word meanings to figure out sentence structure. In some languages, however, semantic categories and basic grammatical structures do not match up—a major problem for semantic bootstrapping.
Other theorists believe that children master grammar through direct observation of the structure of language: They notice which words appear in the same positions in sentences, take the same morphological endings, and are similarly combined with other words. Over time, from exposure to many instances, they group words into grammatical categories and use them appropriately in sentences.
Still, other theorists agree with the essence of Chomsky's position. One idea accepts semantic bootstrapping but proposes that the grammatical categories into which children group word meanings are innate—present at the outset. Another theory holds that children do not start with innate knowledge but have a special language-making capacity—a set of procedures for analyzing the language they hear that supports the discovery of grammatical irregularities. Research on children learning more than 40 different languages reveals common patterns, consistent with a basic set of strategies. Yet controversy persists over whether a universal language-processing device exists or whether children who hear different languages devise unique strategies.
In sum, virtually all investigators agree that young children are amazing processors of linguistic structure. But the extent to which adult education helps children correct errors and take the next grammatical step forward remains a contested issue in child language research.