Language Acquisition

Learning a language is child's play. Ha. Anyway, less of that... Language acquisition is the process whereby humans learn their (usually) first language. This is a process that starts at the very beginning of a person's life, when they first experience communication through their parents. The language acquired is usually spoken language. There are many theories based around the process of language acquisition, Chomsky's theory is considered to be one of the "main" of these theories.

Noam Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited ability to learn any human language, he believes that every child has a 'language acquisition device' (LAD, bit sexist really) which encodes the main features of a language and its grammatical structure into the child's brain. Chomsky points out that a child could not possibly learn a language through imitation alone (having said that, my youngest brother's first word was actually 'Tesco', which I believe may have had a lot to do with imitation, or possibly the strong influence of slogans, right Harry?) because the language spoken around them is highly irregular – adult's speech is often broken up and even sometimes ungrammatical (unless your father is Stephen Fry or you are a member of the Royal Family). Chomsky's theory applies to all languages as they all contain nouns, verbs, consonants and vowels and children appear to be 'hard-wired' to acquire the grammar. Every language is extremely complex (with the possible exception of the language of TOWIE), often with subtle distinctions which even native speakers are unaware of, such as slang terms and differences in pronunciation. There are undeniable factors of evidence that support Chomsky's theory. For example, it has been found that children learning to speak never make grammatical errors such as getting their subjects, verbs and objects in the wrong order and if an adult purposely something grammatically incorrectly, the child would notice. However, children often say things that are ungrammatical such as 'daddy car', which they cannot have learnt through pure imitation. Also, mistakes such as 'I drawed' instead of 'I drew' show they are not learning through imitation alone but actually learning language patterns and working things out for themselves.

However, Chomsky's theory can be criticized; at the time his theory was conceived, it was in stark contrast to Skinner's theory of language acquisition in his book, Verbal Behavior. Skinner believed that the process of infants acquiring language had a lot more to do with imitation; he formed the concept of the echoic. This refers to a verbal response coming from a verbal stimulus; basically when a parent says "Cat. Cat. Can you say C-A-T?" and the child responds with something along the lines of "Of course I can, do you think I'm stupid?" or (perhaps more seriously) "C-aaa...caa?".

There are strong arguments in both these theories, and I think definitely imitation plays a large role in children acquiring and producing language, to the degree of which Skinner or Chomsky believed I am unsure. I look forward to broadening my knowledge of this subject in the second year.

Charlotte Muir