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. The specific language which children acquire is determined by the languages spoken or signed around them. 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.
In acquiring their first language children are exposed to a finite, i.e. limited, number of sounds and from this comes an ability to put these sounds together into an infinite number of sequences—i.e. sentences—which can communicate effectively with other people. Acquiring a language is much more than simply memorizing and mimicking sounds or signs. In his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature Steven Pinker writes:
“The triumph of language acquisition is even more impressive when we consider that a talking child has solved a knotty instance of the problem of induction: observing a finite set from which the events are drawn.”
Steven Pinker also writes:
“In cracking the code of language, children’s minds must be constrained to pick out the right kind of generalizations from the speech around them.”
In his book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, Jared Diamond puts it this way:
“As children, we master all this complex structure of human language, without ever learning the explicit rules producing it.”
In a similar vein, Luigi Rizzi, in his chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax, reports:
“Language acquisition is remarkably rapid, given the complexity of the acquired system and the fact that acquisition takes place naturally, without explicit teaching. This remarkable cognitive achievement sets strong empirical conditions for the study of language as a cognitive capacity: linguistic models must be able to capture the fact that every normal child succeeds in acquiring language within the observed limits of time and exposure to data.”
During the first six years of life, children learn about seven words per day. These words are not deliberately taught to them but are selected from the child’s language ambiance. 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. Sentence length increases.
- 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. While a part of the accent comes from phonology—the sound patterns of the new language—much of it also comes from grammar. I found that many adult students began by assuming that learning a new language primarily involved memorizing the new vocabulary and then putting it together using their English grammar. Learning the grammar of the new language was much difficult for them than learning the vocabulary.
When adults attempt to learn a new language, they often find that some languages are more difficult for them to learn than others. This may lead to the mistaken idea that some languages are more complex or difficult than others and that children, like adults, may have more difficulty in learning them. As a result, there are some misconceptions that children must be somehow genetically able to acquire certain languages. In his book New Horizons int he Study of Language and Mind, Noam Chomsky writes:
“There is overwhelming empirical evidence that people are not genetically ‘tuned’ to acquire one rather than another language: rather, the ‘initial stage’ of their language faculty may be assumed to be uniform to a very good approximation. Presented with an array of evidence, the child acquires a specific language, making use of the resources of the initial state that determine a substantial part of the knowledge (competence) acquired; the initial state can be regarded as a fixed biologically-determined function that maps evidence available into acquired knowledge, uniformly for all languages.”
When a person grows up speaking a regional dialect of a language, then moves as an 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. In her chapter in the Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, 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.”
In their chapter on language acquisition in The Linguistics of Sign Languages: An Introduction, Anne Baker, Beppie von den Bogaerd, and Sonjua Jansma write:
“When sufficient signed input is offered from the beginning, a sign language develops more or less parallel to a spoken language in hearing children. The sign language is then acquired as a first language. In the process of first language acquisition, the innate language acquisition device plays a role. This device is not specific for spoken language, but also functions for signed language.”
In looking at the stages of language acquisition for children acquiring a signed language, Anne Baker, Beppie von den Bogaerd, and Sonjua Jansma write:
“When they are around seven or eight months old, deaf children begin to produce rhythmic hand movements. These hand movements are compared, by some researchers, to the vocal babbling of hearing children, that is, the rhythmic repetition of articulatory movements.”
These children reach a one to two word stage between 1 year and 18 months of age. This is followed by a differentiation stage in which the children’s language becomes more complex as they acquire grammatical structures.
A number of researchers have looked to the data about language acquisition to provide some clues or insights into language origins and evolution. For example, in his book The Origins of Grammar, James Hurford writes:
“I take language acquisition as the most promising guide to what happened to language evolution.”
On the other hand, Maggie Tallerman and Kathleen Gibson, in their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, caution:
“There is no reason to think that any specific evidence concerning the origins of language can be gained from studying the acquisition of modern languages. Moreover, infants learning language today have a full language faculty, which clearly is not the case for the earliest hominins.”
More Human Origins
Human Origins: Bipedalism
Human Origins: The Large Brain
Human Origins: The Mind
Human Origins: Pseudo-Archaeology
Human Origins: Humans as naked apes
Human Origins: Teeth
Human Origins: Protolanguage
Human Origins: Fossil Evidence