Language Acquisition it Is Unclear

Language Acquisition

It is unclear exactly how babies and young children acquire language. In humans, language acquisition seems to be instinctual and innate: babies begin making nonsense noises very soon after birth and before long are imitating the sounds they hear in the environment. Because babies can vocalize sounds and syllables, it would seem that language acquisition is at least in part instinctual and innate. On the other hand, learning the complexities of grammar, structure, and usage require memorization and rote skills. Very much like many other things children learn, language involves part innate nature, part environmental nurture.

When children learn basic sensory-motor skills, from manipulating their eating utensils to walking to throwing a ball, they also rely on learning tools such as imitation and means of correction such as punishment and reward systems. Like Pavlov training his dogs, parents and older siblings often use very basic means to teach young children how to perform simple activities. Some activities, like riding a bicycle, take practice, trial and error. Although many of the basic sensory-motor skills used by human beings are hard-wired, some of the more graceful activities must be learned over time through systematic or informal means of teaching.

Learning language is not much different from learning other skills, but it can be a highly complex process. For example, if human beings did not communicate using complex systems of language but instead relied on simple nouns and verbs, we would all sound like what we imagine "cave men" sounded like. "Food good," and other simple sentences do not demand mastery of grammar and in theory, such simple languages could be learned by young children easily. However, from the moment they are born, children are exposed to the voices of others, to the sounds and structures of their culture's language systems. Because they are constantly bombarded with language from people and from television, children start to form primitive sentences from an early age. One of the reasons why people who are born deaf often have difficulty speaking is because of their inability to hear and thereby imitate the sounds and structures of language. Therefore, language acquisition relies heavily on imitation and correction, as much as it depends on the innate biological tools of the human brain.