Chapter 1: The Invention of Language by Children: Environmental and Biological Influences on the Acquisition of Language

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Language Development and Disorders Child and Animal Learning Development Language and cultural evolution

Abstract

Human children grow up in cultural settings of enormous diversity .This differentiation sometimes leads us to overlook those aspects of development that are highly similar, even universal to our species .For example , under widely varying environmental circumstances, while learning different languages within different cultures and under different conditions of child rearing , with different motivations and talents, all normal children acquire their native tongue to a high level of proficiency within a narrow developmental time frame.Evidence from the study of the language learning process suggests that this constancy of outcome , despite variation in environment , has its explanation in biology .Language is universal in the species just because the capacity to learn it is innately given .In Descartes ' s ( 1662/ 1911 ) words : " It is a very remarkable fact that there are none . . .without even excepting idiots , that they cannot arrange different words together , forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts ; while on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same. "In other words , some part of the capacity to learn languages must be " innate." At the same time , it is equally dear that language is " learned."There are about five thousand different languages now in use on the earth, and the speakers of one cannot understand the speakers of the next .Moreover , specific exposure conditions strikingly influence how each of these is acquired : there is a massive correlation between being born in England and coming to speak English and being born in France and speaking French.This immediately shows that the language function is heavily affected by specific environmental stimulation .

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References

1967The Biological Foundations of Language 1959Verbal behavior. By B. F. Skinner. (The Century Psychology Series.) Pp. viii, 478. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1957.1956Language, Thought, and Reality.1989Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language 1971Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.1975Reflections on Language 1990Maturational Constraints on Language Learning 1979Talking to children: language input and acquisition. Edited by Catherine E. Snow and Charles A. Ferguson. Cambridge: University Press, 1977. Pp. x, 369. $16.95.

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2014Properties of dual language input that shape bilingual development and properties of environments that shape dual language input 2004Everything Had a Name, and Each Name Gave Birth to a New Thought: Links between Early Word Learning and Conceptual Organization 2005The emergence of links between lexical acquisition and object categorization: a computational study 2001Comments on Stefka H. Marinova-Todd, D. Bradford Marshall, and Catherine E. Snow's "Three Misconceptions about Age and L2 Learning": Age and L2 Learning: The Hazards of Matching Practical "Implications" with Theoretical "Facts"

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