Language

Acquisition of Language

To begin, let’s think about John and Mary, two hypothetical infants, whose loving parents do everything they can think of to help their offspring learn language. They name the objects and actions that draw their infants’ attention, often speaking in an unusually clear and melodious way, and encourage their infants to speak rather than point and gesture. Two other infants, also developing uneventfully, are raised by equally loving parents who do little to teach words or stimulate talking. These parents assume that their offspring, Robert and Susan, will learn language merely by overhearing the sounds of speech in ordinary household conversations.

In all likelihood, John and Mary will learn more words than Robert and Susan and when they enter school will probably become better readers. But all four infants will begin to speak at about 12 months of age and to put two words together around 6 months later. For the fact is, we are all endowed with the capacity to learn language whether anyone actively encourages us to do so or not. We only need to hear our parents talk—to each other—just as they would if no one were around to hear them.

This enigmatic medium—language—that infants learn so effortlessly is a species-specific trait that evolved in humans uniquely and develops in the young universally. The mental machinery used to learn language is so powerful that infants are able to acquire it at a fairly brisk pace in spite of the fact that their linguistic role models often speak with food in their mouths, at the same time as others, against a background of noise, or all three, and they frequently interrupt each other or abandon sentences in midstream. Oddly, speech that is bad is good enough.

If infants are able to learn their native language under such conditions, the human brain must have some highly specialized linguistic mechanisms that do the heavy lifting. This equipment may even be used creatively, as children do when they make up words or tinker with aspects of linguistic structure by transforming pidgin languages [Page 1242]into creoles—as deaf children do when they streamline or embellish sign languages that have been awkwardly modeled by hearing parents.

...