The Interactionist Approach to Language Acquisition

In this video I describe the interactionist approach to language acquisition. This approach recognizes our genetic predisposition for language and considers how the social environment plays a role in that development. Children are learning more than just vocabulary and syntactical rules and their ability to interact and communicate using language is supported by the adults and other children around them, … Read More

Birth of a Language in Nicaragua

This clip from the documentary “Evolution” shows the development of a new sign language in Nicaragua in the 1980s. This supports an interactionist approach to language acquisition, suggesting that our innate capacity for language must be combined with a social environment before the critical period has passed (around age 7).