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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
Name
Course
Tutor
Date
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
