LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Humans are "hard-wired" to acquire language in a way that other mammals cannot.

• Linguists are not sure if this is due to things specific to the human brain or due to general cognitive faculties.

Cultural Transmission -

• Language is learned by its speakers.
• Humans are not pre-programmed to speak a specific language.

Charles Darwin: language ability is "an instinctive tendency to aqcuire an art".

There are three theories of language acquisition:

• Imitaion Theory - Children hear speech around them and copy it. When a child is raised in a English speaking environment they aquire english.  Although, mistakes such as over-generalization "goed" and "bes" are predictable and consistent.
• Reinforcement Theory - The way in which adults coach children when using language by praise and by correcting the children.  Parents may sometimes correct the truth of the statement rather than the form. The children's mistakes are often rule goverened (by perhaps always adding the suffix -ed to form past tense).
• Active Construction of a Grammar Theory - Rules are hypothesized by the linguistic inputs recognized by childrens acquiring language. As children continuously recieve lanuage input their language is revised to more and more become a model of adult grammar. This accounts for the fact that children can create novel sentences unlike those heard from adults.