How Children Acquire Language

According to Noam Chomsky language is innate in human beings. That means that children inherit the ability to learn and speak a language from their parents. Thus children do not necessarily need to be taught a language in order to speak it. The documentary presents two cases to support this claim. First, consider two parents, one corrects their child every time it makes a mistake and the other one doesn’t. If language was learnt rather than inherited or coded in human genetics, then logic dictates that only one of these children would speak effectively. However, this is not the case. But there is another claim; that children basically imitate their mothers or caregiver’s sounds and words. The idea is that from the words and sentences they learn they can develop their language using the concept of analogy (16:44). So the imitation/innateness debate is all about which of these two claims is correct. While both of them present significant points to support their claims, it is clear that children and effectively all human beings are programmed to learn languages as has been clearly stated in the beginning of this paragraph. Although one would expect the vast languages of the world to be fundamentally differently the opposite is actually true; that all languages in the world are fundamentally similar. Some important characteristics are true in all of them. First, all languages use nouns and verbs in their sentence construction. Secondly, it is also true in all languages that things can be made both positive and negative at the prerogative of the speakers. Thirdly, all human languages have a method to ask questions and to differentiate between singular and plural forms of things. These are all characteristics that offer all languages the ability to express obligatory distinctions (45:47). Based on these fundamental similarities Noam Chomsky states that the 5,000 languages of the world can be considered dialects of one human language. In his defense of this claim, Chomsky asserts that these similar structural principles in all languages prove that the human brain is wired in a way that it can only accept certain languages (those that follow this basic structure) and nothing else (43:32 ). This is why no other languages could have evolved that does not follow these characteristics of principles. What this means is that the human language follows linguistic properties in the human brain in order to evolve and thrive and not the other way round, that the human brain follows language principles.