How important is when and how a child acquires language?

Children's acquisition of language is a particularly interesting and extensive topic which intrigues me in both the way it is acquired and at what age. For me, how children learn, develop and correct themselves is just incredible in itself. Thinking of learning a foreign language now, at this age, where everything is so alien, daunts me.     But then I think when we are only a year or so in age we begin to pick up words from those around us, often ever so simple nouns such as 'mummy' or 'cat' and somehow begin to adapt and apply these to particular situations.

 

If all children learn language in the same way regardless of the actual language they speak it leads me to think the main cause of lacking developed language skills would be due to whether or not the child was allowed to learn language at the supposed vital age. Eric Lenneberg (1960s) said that between birth and puberty it is essential that children acquire language. Individual cases such as that of feral children, one being a girl known as Genie, who was locked up until the age of 13 and 7 months, show consequences of this not occurring. Genie emerged unable to talk with little sign of comprehending any vocal sounds and unable to understand those around her. It wasn't just actual words that she seemed to have difficulty in picking up but also phonological sounds in themselves, further detailed in an article 'The Linguistic Development of Genie', it is a prime example in supporting the thought that if language is not acquired at the given age will someone ever be able to develop to the same extent as someone who has acquired the language.

 

As for how the language is picked up, well, children often make mistakes when learning. For example they may say 'I goed there' instead of 'I went there', this is a case where there's an irregular verb being used. The child is simply taking the patterns they've seen in other situations and applying it again here. 'I walk there', however, uses the regular verb 'walk' so when transferring it to the past tense this simply becomes 'I walked there'. Therefore it is easy to see why this generalization has been made; no one sits a child down and explains all these irregular words to them because it would be overwhelming at a young age. Instead through corrections by adults young children are able to adapt their language use and slowly pick up the correct way of speaking and applications of complicated grammar such as irregularities. Another aspect of how they learn their language is in the want of something, for instance they may point to their bottle as an indication of being hungry and say 'Thankyou', implying there are aware that it is the word required to say after they receive something from another person. These ideas are detailed in the article '10 Language Mistakes Kids Make That Are Actually Pretty Smart'.

References:

http://www.neiu.edu/~circill/bofman/ling450/linguistic.pdf

http://mentalfloss.com/article/31648/10-language-mistakes-kids-make-are-actually-pretty-smart

Caroline Burtenshaw