Language is considered one of the attributes that define human beings as a unique species. We are the only species able to employ complex language to communicate our feelings, intentions and also to teach others. Although language is such an exclusive and intricate skill, infants can learn it fairly quickly. Child vocabulary grows very fast once they say their first words growing from 5-20 words at 18-months to about 6000 words by the age of 5 (Bates, 2003). This remarkable ability to acquire language is the basis for a central debate: how much of our ability to acquire, produce and understand language is innate (genetically programmed) and how much is acquired by learning? This essay will focus on the debate between nature and nurture and how research in the area of language produced evidence for both sides of the argument. The claim for an innate ability for language acquisition assumes that we are genetically programmed to acquire language. Human languages demand very complex abilities such as syntactic (sentence formation) and semantic (sentences meaning) rules. We can, however, apply them naturally and automatically hundreds of times every day. If learning language is really about knowing these rules, then language acquisition would involve a massive task for infants. Nativist theorists such as Chomsky advocate that it would be impossible for children to learn such a complicated set of rules if they were not born equipped with specialised brain structures for language acquisition. Chomsky (1968) suggests that children are born with an innate specialised mechanism in their brains (Language Acquisition Device) that allows them to identify the structure-dependence of a language and to be able to use these structures efficie... ... middle of paper ... ..., Vol. 10, No.2/3, pp. 75-107 Baker, Mark. 2005. The Innate Endowment for Language: Overspecified or Underspecified. In P. Carruthers, S. Lawrence and S. Stich (eds.) The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 156-174. Bates, E. (2003). On the nature and nurture of language. Frontiers of biology The brain of Homo sapiens, 241–265. Crain, S., Pietroski, P. (2001). Nature, nurture and universal grammar. Linguistics and Philosophy. Vol. 24, No. 2, Apr., 2001 Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Hertz-Pannier, L., Dubois, J. (2006). Nature and nurture in language acquisition: anatomical and functional brain-imaging studies in infants. Trends in Neuroscience, Vol. 29, No.7 Evans, N., & Levinson, S. C. (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(5), 429-492.
In the early stage of human life, an infant who is in their mother’s womb has already experienced communicating their language through actions by responding to their mother’s voice by kicking. Hence communicating their language will then expand from just limited actions to words as they develop throughout the years. And the four structural Language components; phonology, semantics, grammar and pragmatics will be involved during the stages of their language development and these components are significantly supported by the roles of nature and nurture. Fellowes & Oakley (2014, p. 21) ‘The phonological component of language comprises the various sounds that are used in speaking.
When most people think of the process of language development in “normal” children, the concepts that come to mind are of babies imitating, picking up sounds and words from the speakers around them. Trying to imagine that a child who cannot hear one single sound a person makes can learn to speak a language is absolutely fascinating. These children range from amazin...
How can it be that something so uniquely human and commonplace in our everyday existence as language, could transcend the limits of our immediate understanding? We all know how to speak and comprehend at least one language, but defining what we actually know about that language an infinitely more demanding process. How can a child without previous knowledge of the construction and concepts of language be born into the world with an innate ability to apprehend any dialect? Mark Baker, in his book The Atoms of Language, seeks to address these unsettling questions, proposing as a solution, a set of underlying linguistic ingredients, which interact to generate the wide variety of languages we see today.
Kuhl, P. (2007). Is speech learning 'gated' by the social brain?. Developmental Science, 10(1), 110-120.
The analysis of Chomsky’s argument in Christiansen & Chater’s (2008) article suggests that there may be an innate universal grammar (UG), meaning that humans are born with the biological ability to obtain language across different cultures.... ... middle of paper ... ... Works Cited Behme, C., & Deacon, S. H. (2008). Language Learning in Infancy: Does the Empirical Evidence Support a Domain-Specific Language Acquisition Device?
This essay is about a child’s development and learning, focusing primarily on language development. It will describe the main stages of developmental "milestones" and the key concepts involved for children to develop their language skills, discussing language acquisition and social learning theory. The essay will also look into the key theorists involved in language development, primarily Vygotsky and Chomsky, and how these theories have had an impact on the way society views language and their implementation within schools. The essay will describe the factors affecting language development, both biological and environmental. While also discussing key arguments among theorists, one being the nature vs nurture debate, and how these play a part in the teaching in schools.
In the discussion of nature verse nurture, one controversial issue is language. Arguing on the side of nature, children across the world seem to exhibit universal stages of linguistic development. Infants as young as seven months old are able to recognize simple linguistic rules from a string of sounds. When a child is first learning to speak, they typically combine words in ways that an adult would not. They can also speak and communicate clearly without adult correction. These observations suggest that we are born with the capacity to communicate verbally and through the use of kinesics, or gestures. However, nurture also plays a large role in the use of language. Linguistics differ amongst children from region to region based on the way the people around them speak. Thousands of languages such as: Spanish, English, Italian, and Creole are spoken around the world. Vernacular and accents also vary within each language and is acquired through a learning process, not genetics(Brown, 10/1/13). Another major environmental factor is correction from parents and adults. A child may be born with the ability to speak, but grammatical correctness and annunciation requi...
Nearly every member of the human race learns a language or more to the degree of proficiency only in the first few years of life. How children achieve this astonishing skill in such little time has sparked controversial debates among linguists, psychologists, and scientists throughout centuries. Some believe that language is an innate ability possessed by all human beings due to the remarkable function of the brain, while others maintain that language is learned from childhood experience. However, many are beginning to realize that nature and nurture go hand-in-hand when explaining how children develop their language(s). Despite the claims that language is either pre-learned or environmentally learned alone, the combination of both genes and experience better explains the aspects of first language acquisition.
In her article, “Babies Prove Sound Learners,” Sohn (2008) states, “Such studies show that, up to about 6 months of age, babies can recognize all the sounds that make up all the languages in the world” (para.24). B. K. Skinner suggests that the materialization of language is the result of imitation and reinforcement. According to Craig and Dunn (2010), “Language development is linked to cognitive development that, in turn, depends on the development of the brain, on physical and perceptual abilities, and on experiences. Biological and social factors also jointly influence the early development of emotion and personality” (p. 117). In her article, A natural history of early language experience.
In this part, the writer will point out the importance of the biological and neural foundation of language learning by discussing the following :First, the brain anatomy. Second, l...
Language acquisition is perhaps one of the most debated issues of human development. Various theories and approaches have emerged over the years to study and analyse this developmental process. One factor contributing to the differing theories is the debate between nature v’s nurture. A question commonly asked is: Do humans a...
There are three main theories of child language acquisition; Cognitive Theory, Imitation and Positive Reinforcement, and Innateness of Certain Linguistic Features (Linguistics 201). All three theories offer a substantial amount of proof and experiments, but none of them have been proven entirely correct. The search for how children acquire their native language in such a short period of time has been studied for many centuries. In a changing world, it is difficult to pinpoint any definite specifics of language because of the diversity and modification throughout thousands of millions of years.
Biological foundation of language may contribute significantly to such universality. The issue here is not whether language is innate, for, clearly, language must be learned. Nor is the issue whether the aptitude for learning a la...
How do children acquire language? What are the processes of language acquisition? How do infants respond to speech? Language acquisition is the process of learning a native or a second language. Although how children learn to speak is not perfectly understood, most explanations involve both the observations that children copy what they hear and the inference that human beings have a natural aptitude for understanding grammar. Children usually learn the sounds and vocabulary of their native language through imitation, (which helps them learn to pronounce words correctly), and grammar is seldom taught to them, but instead that they rapidly acquire the ability to speak grammatically. Though, not all children learn by imitation alone. Children will produce forms of language that adults never say. For example, “I spilled milk on hisself” or “Debbie wants a cookie”. This demonstrates that children have the desire to speak correctly and have self-motivating traits to communicate. This supports the theory of Noam Chomsky (1972)-that children are able to learn grammar of a particular language because all intelligible languages are founded on a deep structure of universal grammatical rules that corresponds to an innate capacity of the human brain. Adults learning a second language pass through some of the same stages, as do children learning their native language. In the first part of this paper I will describe the process of language acquisition. The second part will review how infants respond to speech.
Still today, it is the commonly held belief that children acquire their mother tongue through imitation of the parents, caregivers or the people in their environment. Linguists too had the same conviction until 1957, when a then relatively unknown man, A. Noam Chomsky, propounded his theory that the capacity to acquire language is in fact innate. This revolutionized the study of language acquisition, and after a brief period of controversy upon the publication of his book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, in 1964, his theories are now generally accepted as largely true. As a consequence, he was responsible for the emergence of a new field during the 1960s, Developmental Psycholinguistics, which deals with children’s first language acquisition. He was not the first to question our hitherto mute acceptance of a debatable concept – long before, Plato wondered how children could possibly acquire so complex a skill as language with so little experience of life. Experiments have clearly identified an ability to discern syntactical nuances in very young infants, although they are still at the pre-linguistic stage. Children of three, however, are able to manipulate very complicated syntactical sentences, although they are unable to tie their own shoelaces, for example. Indeed, language is not a skill such as many others, like learning to drive or perform mathematical operations – it cannot be taught as such in these early stages. Rather, it is the acquisition of language which fascinates linguists today, and how it is possible. Noam Chomsky turned the world’s eyes to this enigmatic question at a time when it was assumed to have a deceptively simple explanation.