"Language Acquisition" How Children Acquire Language

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with speech or manual as in sign. Language acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, rather than second language acquisition, which deals with acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.

The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes humans from other organisms. While many forms of animal communication exist, they have a limited range of nonsyntactically structured vocabulary tokens that lack cross cultural variation between groups.

A major concern in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infants from what appears to be very little input. A range of theories of language acquisition has been created in order to explain this apparent problem including innatism in which a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities, as opposed to the other theories in which language is simply learned.

Language acquisition is one of the central topics in cognitive science. Every theory of cognition has tried to explain it; probably no other topic has aroused such controversy. Possessing a language is the quintessentially human trait: all normal humans speak, no nonhuman animal does. Language is the main vehicle by which we know about other people's thoughts, and the two must be intimately related. 

The Biology of Language Acquisition
Human language is made possible by special adaptations of the human mind and body that occurred in the course of human evolution, and which are put to use by children in acquiring their mother tongue.

Explaining Language Acquisition

How do we explain children's course of language acquisition -- most importantly, their inevitable and early mastery? Several kinds of mechanisms are at work. As we saw in section (), the brain changes after birth, and these maturational changes may govern the onset, rate, and adult decline of language acquisition capacity. General changes in the child's information processing abilities (attention, memory, short-term buffers for acoustic input and articulatory output) could leave their mark as well. In the next chapter, I show how a memory retrieval limitation -- children are less reliable at recalling that broke is the past tense of break -- can account for a conspicuous and universal.

The topic of language acquisition implicate the most profound questions about our understanding of the human mind, and its subject matter, the speech of children, is endlessly fascinating. But the attempt to understand it scientifically is guaranteed to bring on a certain degree of frustration. Languages are complex combinations of elegant principles and historical accidents. We cannot design new ones with independent properties; we are stuck with the confounded ones entrenched in communities. Children, too, were not designed for the benefit of psychologists: their cognitive, social, perceptual, and motor skills are all developing at the same time as their linguistic systems are maturing and their knowledge of a particular language is increasing, and none of their behavior reflects one of these components acting in isolation. 

How Children Acquire language?

Although how children learn to speak is not perfectly understood, most explanations involve both the observation that children copy what they hear and the inference that human beings have a natural aptitude for understanding grammar. While children usually learn the sounds and vocabulary of their native language through imitation, grammar is seldom taught to them explicitly.

How Do Kids Learn Language?

The first teachers in a kid's life are their parents and anybody else they can interact with. As kids start to become aware of the world around them, they begin to want to communicate. Talking is fun and it gets you what you want!

Kids seem to just absorb language, but it is actually much more complicated than that. Linguists believe that there is a build-in language apparatus programmed into the human brain. Because the brain is wired for language, all it takes is input. Once a kid hears language around them, the sounds, words and structures get plugged into this framework.

Language ability develops along with a child's overall mental and physical development, but without the constant language input around them, they will not become competent speakers of a language.

They babies are motivated. Communicating is fun for kids, and it's also a matter of survival. Put yourself into a situation where you need to use your second language to survive, and make studying and practicing fun.Kids learn by doing, but also need to learn the rules. For adults, this means that you shouldn't chuck your textbooks right away. Even if you plan to get out there and talk your way to fluency, keep those study materials handy for the little grammar quirks that won't be so easy to figure out.

When babies are born, they can make and hear all the sounds in all the languages in the world. That’s about 150 sounds in about 6500 languages! However, no language uses all 150 sounds. The sounds a language uses are called phonemes and English has about 44. Some languages use more and some use fewer.

In this stage, babies learn which phonemes belong to the language they are learning and which don’t. The ability to recognize and produce those sounds is called “phonemic awareness,” which is important for children learning to read.