Bruner and Wittgenstein: Language Learning :: Psychology Children Communication Papers

Bruner and Wittgenstein Language LearningA crucial phase in the childs development comes with its acquisition of wrangle, but before we can affiance in any pedagogical efforts to further infant development or to aid atypical cases, we need to understand methodologically what occurs during actors line learning. Jerome Bruner, in a methodological adaptation of Ludwig Wittgensteins middle and later work in an extension of Noam Chomskys LAD, has put forth one influential proposal (Bruner 1983). Ludwig Wittgensteins own remarks on the guinea pig also furnish an interesting story independent of Bruners selective use of his corpus, especially insofar as his approach results in an irreducible riddle and a hypothesis by his own account (Wittgenstein 1953 and 1958). The two views are explored, contrasted and critiqued. In the end, neither will do to resolve problems in our methodological understanding of language acquisition, for which the most important reasons are given. Most children le arn language with remarkable ease, but how are we to account for this extraordinary fact? The problem plaguing our understanding of language and language acquisition can be described as. How can one learn anything genuinely new and become linguistically creative and how this learning is assertable at all, unless one already has some path into language, for example, a suitable framework in which language learning takes place? It is this framework that interests us here. genius possible picture is provided by St. Augustine, who exchangeablens the childs learning of language to a fantastical coming into a foreign land, unable to understand what is said, yet already in possession of some language, only not the one spoken here. To Wittgenstein, the picture painted in St. Augustines Confessions is not representative of the scenery encountered by the first-time language learner, for this stranger who slowly decodes the puzzle of the strange surrounding sounds already has a framework. St . Augustine alters the character of the learner so that the issue of a suitable framework does not arise. Philosophers like Chomsky or Fodor, although historically distant from Augustine, try to provide a new answer to the same question. Their solution differs only in the sense that it shifts the problem onto a universal grammar or a language acquisition device, which thus provides the entry point into language.In his effort to dissolve philosophical issues, Wittgenstein makes a great many methodological suggestions in his later work, criss-crossing language, meaning, thought, and so forth. We also find