Language and Cognition: Theories of Language Acquisition

Learning cannot account for the rapid rate at which children acquire language.
There can be an infinite number of sentences in a language. All these sentences cannot be learned by imitation.
Children make errors, such as overregularizing verbs. For example, a child may say Billy hitted me, incorrectly adding the usual past tense suffix -ed to hit. Errors like these can’t result from imitation, since adults generally use correct verb forms.
Children acquire language skills even though adults do not consistently correct their syntax.

Neural Networks

Some cognitive neuroscientists have created neural networks, or computer models, that can acquire some aspects of language. These neural networks are not preprogrammed with any rules. Instead, they are exposed to many examples of a language. Using these examples, the neural networks have been able to learn the language’s statistical structure and accurately make the past tense forms of verbs. The developers of these networks speculate that children may acquire language in a similar way, through exposure to multiple examples.

Biological Influences on Language Acquisition

The main proponent of the view that biological influences bring about language development is the well-known linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky argues that human brains have a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate mechanism or process that allows children to develop language skills. According to this view, all children are born with a universal grammar, which makes them receptive to the common features of all languages. Because of this hard-wired background in grammar, children easily pick up a language when they are exposed to its particular grammar.

Evidence for an innate human capacity to acquire language skills comes from the following observations:

The stages of language development occur at about the same ages in most children, even though different children experience very different environments.
Children’s language development follows a similar pattern across cultures.
Children generally acquire language skills quickly and effortlessly.
Deaf children who have not been exposed to a language may make up their own language. These new languages resemble each other in sentence structure, even when they are created in different cultures.