‘Children are born ready to learn language’
The notion that children are born ready to learn language is part of a longstanding linguistic debate between nature and
nurture. Where linguists like Noam Chomsky would argue children are born equipped with all the knowledge they need to
learn language, opposing viewpoints from theorists like Tomasello might argue that children are born with the cognitive
abilities to learn language but not linguistic knowledge. However, some theorists such as Vygotksy, supporting the Social
Interaction approach, may argue disregard both of these ideas, and theorise that children are not born ready to learn
language in any way, and instead learn from caregivers.
The idea that children are born ready to learn language is most commonly associated with the innate perspective. Nativist
Noam Chomsky proposed that all children have inbuilt knowledge of a Universal Grammar that is stored within the
Language Acquisition Device and that this set of rules (or ‘principles’ of language, as labelled by Pinker) supports their
development of language as children only need to decode the grammatical parameters of the specific language that they
are learning. The uniform way that children appear to acquire grammatical structures is often cited as verification of this
approach as nativists argue that it provides evidence for the common grammatical knowledge that children are
supposedly born with which is apparently influencing their syntactic development despite different contexts. Researchers
Klima and Bellugi proposed the idea that there are uniform stages of acquisition for interrogatives and this research could
be applied to the utterances produced by the children in the transcript. Both Ben (age 5) and James (age 3) appear to be
at stage three of interrogative acquisition as they can both confidently produce utterances that include initial interrogative
pronouns and inversion of the subject and verbs of the clause (e.g. ‘why is there a red light’; how do you switch it off’; ‘who
are you’). The fact that both children have acquired these complex structures at a relatively young age could perhaps be
further interpreted as evidence of the innate approach as children can make rapid progress despite what Chomsky
labelled ‘the poverty of the stimulus’. Nativists suggest that this is further proof that all children are born with some kind of
underlying grammatical knowledge which supports their ability to acquire language so successfully and so quickly. This is
perhaps most clearly indicated by the syntactically complex utterances produced by Ben which successfully include
multiple subordinate clauses and interrogative structures (e.g. ‘I said are you doing what I asked you to do’). Further
evidence of the children following supposedly universal patterns of acquisition can also be found in the language of James
in the transcript. He frequently omits the verb ‘to be’ both as a stative main verb (e.g. ‘he older’; ‘I a stormtrooper’; we
The notion that children are born ready to learn language is part of a longstanding linguistic debate between nature and
nurture. Where linguists like Noam Chomsky would argue children are born equipped with all the knowledge they need to
learn language, opposing viewpoints from theorists like Tomasello might argue that children are born with the cognitive
abilities to learn language but not linguistic knowledge. However, some theorists such as Vygotksy, supporting the Social
Interaction approach, may argue disregard both of these ideas, and theorise that children are not born ready to learn
language in any way, and instead learn from caregivers.
The idea that children are born ready to learn language is most commonly associated with the innate perspective. Nativist
Noam Chomsky proposed that all children have inbuilt knowledge of a Universal Grammar that is stored within the
Language Acquisition Device and that this set of rules (or ‘principles’ of language, as labelled by Pinker) supports their
development of language as children only need to decode the grammatical parameters of the specific language that they
are learning. The uniform way that children appear to acquire grammatical structures is often cited as verification of this
approach as nativists argue that it provides evidence for the common grammatical knowledge that children are
supposedly born with which is apparently influencing their syntactic development despite different contexts. Researchers
Klima and Bellugi proposed the idea that there are uniform stages of acquisition for interrogatives and this research could
be applied to the utterances produced by the children in the transcript. Both Ben (age 5) and James (age 3) appear to be
at stage three of interrogative acquisition as they can both confidently produce utterances that include initial interrogative
pronouns and inversion of the subject and verbs of the clause (e.g. ‘why is there a red light’; how do you switch it off’; ‘who
are you’). The fact that both children have acquired these complex structures at a relatively young age could perhaps be
further interpreted as evidence of the innate approach as children can make rapid progress despite what Chomsky
labelled ‘the poverty of the stimulus’. Nativists suggest that this is further proof that all children are born with some kind of
underlying grammatical knowledge which supports their ability to acquire language so successfully and so quickly. This is
perhaps most clearly indicated by the syntactically complex utterances produced by Ben which successfully include
multiple subordinate clauses and interrogative structures (e.g. ‘I said are you doing what I asked you to do’). Further
evidence of the children following supposedly universal patterns of acquisition can also be found in the language of James
in the transcript. He frequently omits the verb ‘to be’ both as a stative main verb (e.g. ‘he older’; ‘I a stormtrooper’; we
