What is the important time for children to acquire language?

What is the important time for children to acquire language? By Kayleigh Campbell

Lack of speech due to lack of socialisation is a big problem now a days…It surprises me to read about children that are never socialised and how hard they find it when they require/learn language. For example one child that I have read about is a girl called Genie. She was locked away by her father and was never spoken to or allowed to speak. When she was eventually found she was thirteen and a half years of age and she didn't know how to speak or understand what people were saying to her as she had never been spoken to so and had not required language. This makes me think that there is a critical time when children must require language to be able to learn and develop what it all means and how they can use it. All children acquire language in the same way regardless of what language they speak. Eric Lenneberg (1960s) says that there is a critical time from birth to puberty when language must be acquired for children to be able to develop their language further and to be able to communicate with others; he adds that if this does not happen then normal language cannot be acquired. We know that the rules of language aren't taught however we know that children are corrected to understand how to speak English. This then means that children will acquire language by being corrected and then they will understand how language works. When children are speaking they say things that adults would never say such as 'I holded the rabbit' instead of 'I held the rabbit.' Children imitate their parents when they hear them speak to learn language and understand what they are telling them and want them to say back, for example 'hello' which the child would then say 'hello' back. However in view of all this we know many rules of language that we don't learn such as the phonological rules of language. Children are not taught how to talk in the past tense…they just acquire it and accept that way of language. Adding to this children are not taught the morphological rule of adding emphasis to words such and 'bang' and 'pop'. However children sometimes don't learn things that are explicitly pointed out to them, for example a child might say 'I catched the ball' and they would then by corrected by an adult which would say that they should say 'I caught the ball' and this way they would have been corrected and would know how to say it next time. If children are never fully socialised at a really early age it can cause them a really big problem for them in later life as they will never be able to fully communicate with others in later life. This tells me that there really is a critical time between birth until puberty where children should be socialised so that they can fully acquire language and understand how to communicate with others.