Since language is found in all normally-functioning humans, it is logical to assume that the potential for language, but not the language itself, must somehow have a biological, neurological, or genetic basis. This does not mean that children are born with a specific language, but rather they are born with the ability to acquire the language or languages of the culture(s) into which they are born. Anthropologist L. L. Langness, in The Study of Culture, says:
“Our capacity to speak is surely innate; our capacity to speak English is surely cultural.”
Language appears to develop in all children under normal circumstances between the ages of 1 and 5. It does not seem to make any difference which language is being acquired: the acquisition of language in children follows a maturational development. In early childhood language is acquired—that is, children pick it up unconsciously through their engagement with everyday activities. In his book New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, linguist Noam Chomsky reports:
“Language acquisition seems much like the growth of organs generally; it is something that happens to a child, not that the child does.”
Noam Chomsky goes on to say:
“The faculty of language is embedded within the broader architecture of the mind/brain. It interacts with other systems, which impose conditions that language must satisfy if it is to be usable at all.”
In should be noted that language acquisition requires an environment in which the child is exposed to language. Children are not formally taught language. Later in life, they may learn additional languages through explicit or formal instruction.
The approximate sequence for language acquisition goes something like this:
- Less than Year: During their first months of life, children acquire the sounds of language and by six months they can distinguish critical vowel sounds. Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, reports:
“By six months, they are beginning to lump together the distinct sounds that their language collapses into a single phoneme, while continuing to discriminate equivalently distinct ones that their language keeps separate.”
Pinker goes on to report:
“Between seven and eight months, they suddenly begin to babble in real syllables like ba-bab-ba, neh-neh-neh, and dee-dee-dee.”
- 1 Year: By their first birthday, children begin to understand words and they start to produce them. Steven Pinker reports:
“Words are usually produced in isolation; this one word stage can last from two months to a year.”
At about 18 months, children begin to acquire new words fairly easily. The words they acquire at this stage tend to be short—less than three syllables—and generally refer to objects or people.
- 2 Years: By 2 years of age, the average child has a vocabulary of about 200 words and an ability to understand more. Zdenek Salzmann, in his book Language, Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, reports:
“Initial consonants of words tend to be pronounced more distinctly by this age group than the consonants toward the word ends.”
- 3-4 Years: Steven Pinker calls this stage of language acquisition as “All Hell Breaks Loose.” Children begin to acquire syntax and grammar. They are able to generate sentences which they have never heard before.
- 5 Years: In her chapter in the Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, Margaret Deuchar reports
“By the age of five children have usually acquired something close to the full adult system.”
Research suggests that as children go through puberty, they lose the ability to acquire language. Steven Pinker writes:
“Everyone knows that it is much more difficult to learn a second language in adulthood than a first language in childhood. Most adults never master a foreign language, especially the phonology—hence the ubiquitous foreign accent.”
Zdenek Salzmann puts it this way:
“Learning to speak a foreign language is a formidable task, and most adults fail to achieve fluency even after many years of trying. Children, however, learn their native language with no apparent effort and without instruction before they reach school age. One widely accepted theory concerning language acquisition holds that infants are born with an abstract language model already programmed in their brains.”
When adults learn another language, they will always speak it with a foreign accent rather than with the fluency of a native speaker. In his book The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals, Thomas Suddendorf writes:
“Learning a second language after puberty usually results in an accent that is virtually impossible to overcome.”
My own experience of four decades of teaching Spanish to adults has clearly demonstrated this fact.
Similarly, when a person grows up speaking a regional dialect of a language, then moves as adult to an area where another regional dialect is spoken, traces of the original dialect will remain. For children, however, the situation is different. In his book Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human, Matt Ridley writes:
“People change their accents easily during youth, generally adopting the accent of people their own age in the surrounding society. But sometime between about 15 and 25, this flexibility simply vanishes. From then on, even if a person emigrates to a different country and lives there for many years, his or her accent will change very little.”
While most children acquire spoken language, deaf children raised in homes where deaf sign language is used acquire sign language. Margaret Deuchar reports:
“Deaf children learning sign languages on the basis of signing produced by their deaf parents proceed in a very similar way to children learning spoken languages, passing through similar stages.”
In his book New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, linguist Noam Chomsky writes:
“Though highly specialized, the language faculty is not tied to specific sensory modalities, contrary to what was assumed not long ago. Thus, the sign language for the deaf is structurally much like spoken language, and the course of acquisition is very similar.”