Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is the study of how humans come to understand and produce language, especially how children acquire their first language and how learners acquire additional languages.
Definition
The branch of psycholinguistics concerned with the processes and mechanisms by which humans acquire the ability to perceive, comprehend, and produce language.
Scope
This area covers the developmental course of first-language acquisition (from prelinguistic perception through babbling, first words, and grammar), the mechanisms proposed to explain it (innate constraints, statistical and social learning, and usage-based generalization), the acquisition of additional languages and bilingualism, and the question of whether there is a maturationally constrained window for native-like learning. It surveys the principal theories and the empirical findings that bear on them rather than offering language-teaching advice.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How do children acquire grammar so rapidly and uniformly from limited input?
- What is innate versus learned in language acquisition?
- Do statistical and social-pragmatic learning suffice, or is specialized linguistic knowledge required?
- How does acquiring a second language differ from acquiring a first, and does age constrain it?
Key concepts
- poverty of the stimulus
- universal grammar
- critical period
- overregularization
- statistical learning
- child-directed speech
Key theories
- Nativism and the poverty of the stimulus
- The view, associated with Chomsky, that children acquire grammar despite degenerate and finite input because they bring innate, language-specific knowledge (a universal grammar) to the task.
- Usage-based / constructivist acquisition
- Tomasello's account that children build grammatical competence from concrete linguistic experience using general cognitive and social-pragmatic abilities such as intention-reading and pattern-finding, without a dedicated innate grammar.
- Statistical learning
- The proposal that infants track distributional regularities (for example, transitional probabilities between syllables) to segment speech and discover linguistic structure, demonstrated experimentally in infancy.
History
Modern study of language acquisition was reshaped by Chomsky's 1959 critique of Skinner's behaviorist account, which placed innate structure at the center of the field. Subsequent decades saw nativist approaches challenged by connectionist, usage-based, and statistical-learning research, alongside detailed empirical work on bilingual and second-language acquisition.
Debates
- Nature versus nurture in grammar acquisition
- Whether grammatical knowledge requires innate, language-specific endowment (nativism) or can emerge from general learning mechanisms applied to rich input (usage-based and statistical-learning accounts).
Key figures
- Noam Chomsky
- Michael Tomasello
- Elissa Newport
- Jenny Saffran
- Eric Lenneberg
Related topics
Seminal works
- chomsky1959
- tomasello2003
- saffran1996
Frequently asked questions
- Is the ability to learn language innate?
- This is contested. Nativist theories hold that children bring innate linguistic constraints to acquisition, while usage-based and statistical-learning accounts argue that general cognitive and social abilities applied to rich input can explain acquisition without language-specific innate knowledge.
- Do children learn language by imitation?
- Imitation plays a role, but it cannot by itself explain acquisition: children produce novel forms and errors (such as 'goed') they never heard, indicating they extract and generalize rules rather than simply copying.