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.
·
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!
