Language Aquisition

Language Acquisition

Samantha Keane

ENG/380

May 30, 2016

Jennifer Kubach

Language Acquisition

It has been argued by Noam Chomsky that acquiring a language is something humans are predisposed to.  B.F. Skinner has an opposing argument where children learn a language through imitation.  From the early months of life until around three children go through many stages of language acquisition.  Once a language is adopted a child or adult can acquire a second language, or become bilingual.  In addition to acquiring languages, as humans we have a capacity to create languages known as “language genesis, which is the spontaneous creation of new languages” (2013, p. 49).  There is a saying that our minds work in mysterious ways, language acquisition, bilingualism, and the capacity we have to create languages are all something to be curious about.

Stages of the First Language Acquisition

There are many stages of the first language acquisition ranging from a few months after birth until up to age four.  A combination of a predisposition and imitation of adults lead a baby from prelinguisitic, to babbling, to the one-word stage, then the two-word stage, followed by the early multiword stage and finally ending with the later multiword stage.  Language is expressed through speech, and the progression of that is matched with the different stages.  Children go from babbling vowels and sounds to words and then to sentences.  All children tend to go through these same language stages and make the same language mistakes (Uniview Worldwide, 1996).  Grammar rules are very hard to follow but children seem to learn them the same way they acquire their first language, some by nature and some by nurture.   Children’s acquisition of language provides us with evidence for Universal Grammar, the set of grammatical rules and principles common to all languages “Denham and Lobeck, 2013).  According to Denham and Lobeck the “critical period for language acquisition is early childhood to prepuberty: according to some, the best, maybe only, time in which humans can acquire a language” (2013, p. 43).  

Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism

Second language acquisition is also known as the process of learning a foreign language.  Learning a second language is completely different then how humans learn their native language, or their first language.  As babies, we are immersed in our native language but while we are acquiring a second language, we are really learning a second language.  As you can either be an adult or a child learning a second language, there are different motivations.  In chapter 2 of Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction, we learn “Another important factor is motivation; we acquire our first language without conscious motivation, but we often learn a second language for a specific reason…” (2013, p. 47).  A great example of motivation would be from families from non-English speaking countries who move to America.  The children need to acquire the language quickly to do well in school while the parents can use their children as translators.