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Acquisition of Language in Children Essay

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Possessing a language is a quintessentially human trait, yet the acquisition of language in children is not perfectly understood. Most explanations involve the observation that children mimic what they hear and the assumption that human beings have a natural ability to understand grammar. Behaviorist B.F. Skinner originally proposed that language must be learned and cannot be a module. The mind consisted of sensorimotor abilities as well as laws of learning that govern gradual changes in an organism’s behavior (Skinner, B.F., 1957). Noam Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Chomsky, 1959) challenged this belief by arguing that children learn languages that are governed by highly subtle and abstract principles, …show more content…

In every child's Universal Grammar there exists a finite amount of linguistic rules. These rules are hierarchical. Syntactic rules for example, have deep structures, which are then converted into the surface representation as directed by these rules (Chomsky, 1965). Through exposure to any particular linguistic environment, rules are learned and a grammar for that particular language is built. The Universal Grammar acts as a menu, giving potential for all the differing rules observed throughout the world's languages. Any particular linguistic environment acts as a switch for selecting which rules apply to the language a child is exposed to and then builds a grammar of rules specific to that language (or languages if the child is in a multi-lingual environment) (Carroll, 2006). This point is easily illustrated in two stages noted as cooing and babbling. At the stage of cooing, a baby produces many different phonetic articulations despite what sounds may or may not be in the phonetic inventory of the surrounding linguistic environment, meaning sounds, which are not represented in the linguistic environment, may very well be made by the baby. The second stage, babbling is distinguishable in that the baby picks up on the phonetic units present in his or her particular linguistic environment. More support for the hypothesis of a UG considers Chomsky's proposal of generative grammar.

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