First Language Acquisition

As I watch my son grow, I am amazed at how quickly he learns to do things.  In the beginning, he would stare blankly at lights and other bright objects.  Now, at five months old he focuses in on our (my wife and I) faces.  As I cross the room, his gaze follows me.  He is also getting better at using his hands. In the first weeks and months of his life, my son flailed his arms around wildly at times.  However, now he can pick up things (for example, a pacifier) and bring them to his mouth.  He has gotten very good at this!  Another thing, and the most amazing thing in my opinion, is how he is advancing in the area of language.  Granted, he is a baby of five months, but we have witnessed changes from day to day.  The first weeks with our son were all crying and nothing else.  Whatever he needed or wanted, he got our attention by crying.  But slowly the cries began to differentiate.  We could tell the difference between a hungry cry, a dirty diaper cry, and a “pick-me-up” cry.  Then, he began experimenting with other sounds.  He continues to practice day and night different vowel sounds, cooing and laughing!  Our hearts melt every time he smiles or gives us a big laugh.  I am eager to keep watching how my son grows and goes through the different stages.  I am so proud of my boy, but this process is happening all over the world in all kinds of languages.  How can children acquire language so perfectly and so quickly?

Children acquire their mother tongue with relative ease.  They go through different stages, advancing in their language capacities both mentally and physically.  Babies are born listening to everything.  In fact, they are listening even while inside the womb.  When they are born, infants already have language skills embedded in their brain to observe and perceive language.  At the same time, they have mechanisms that develop in a way that allow them to produce sounds (which eventually becomes language).  At around three months, babies begin to coo.  They have been listening silently and now start to laugh as well as coo.  Around five to seven months they babble in syllables (ba-ba, dee-dee).  At the end of the first year, babies usually understand some words and many even say a few.  Here, it will depend on each individual as to the rate in which they learn words and phrases.  Around 18 months, language really starts taking off, with two and three-word combinations.  During the late twos and mid threes, sentence length grows a lot and language is enhanced tenfold.  These timeframes, however, can vary from child to child.  They make more complex structures and they rarely produce weird errors.  That is to say, they make expected errors according to their stage of development.  At three years old, a child has mastered most constructions, they obey most grammar rules, and when they make mistakes, the mistakes are adult-like.

According to Noam Chomsky, language acquisition is achievable due to an inherited ability within all human beings.  He writes that there is something innate in our mind that allows us to acquire language no matter how big the obstacle in our path.  Even blind and deaf people are capable of acquiring language!  Chomsky calls this innate “thing” the Language Acquisition Device (LAD).  He claims that the LAD encodes the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children have then only to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures from the LAD to form sentences.  This is where Chomsky’s Poverty of Stimulus and Universal Grammar theories come in.  The input that a child receives from adults is rather poor and irregular, and many times ungrammatical.  How can children acquire language so quickly and so well?  There must be something innate within us!  Internal factors appear, then, to be more important than external factors.  For example, children acquire language from positive evidence rather than reinforcement from their parents. 

Chomsky does not discard social factors, but he puts more importance on individual and biological factors.  The Critical Period hypothesis (which is more important in Second Language Acquisition), for example, proposes that there is a point in an individual’s life where their access to Universal Grammar is cut off, due to the lateralization of the brain.  This happens around the time of puberty, which will be different for each person.  After this point, acquiring language, in theory, becomes much more difficult. 

Evidence to support Chomsky’s theory

·         Children learning to speak never make grammatical errors such as getting their subjects, verbs and objects in the wrong order.

·         If an adult deliberately said a grammatically incorrect sentence, the child would notice.

·         Children often say things that are ungrammatical such as ‘mama ball’, which they cannot have learnt passively.

·         Mistakes such as ‘I drawed’ instead of ‘I drew’ show they are not learning through imitation alone.

·         Chomsky used the sentence ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’, which is grammatical although it doesn’t make sense, to prove his theory: he said it shows that sentences can be grammatical without having any meaning, that we can tell the difference between a grammatical and an ungrammatical sentence without ever having heard the sentence before, and that we can produce and understand brand new sentences that no one has ever said before.

In my opinion, Chomsky’s theories are very strong and make a great case.  There is a lot of evidence to support his claims.  As for me, I will continue to enjoy seeing my baby boy grow and acquire not only Spanish (since we live in Argentina), but English as well! 

Stay tuned for an upcoming post about Second Language Acquisition and more baby talking videos!

Check out these videos (1 - 2 - 3) to see language acquisition in action!