13 Facts About Language acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.

Language acquisition can be vocalized as in speech, or manual as in sign.

Linguists who are interested in child language acquisition have for many years questioned how language is acquired.

Some early observation-based ideas about language acquisition were proposed by Plato, who felt that word-meaning mapping in some form was innate.

Language acquisition postulated that there is a fundamental difference between animals and humans in their motivation to learn language; animals, such as in Nim's case, are motivated only by physical reward, while humans learn language in order to "create a new type of communication".

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Language acquisition had been entirely isolated for the first thirteen years of her life by her father.

Language acquisition was able to acquire a large vocabulary, but never acquired grammatical knowledge.

Major debate in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infants from the linguistic input.

Emergentist theories, such as Brian MacWhinney's competition model, posit that language acquisition is a cognitive process that emerges from the interaction of biological pressures and the environment.

The findings of many empirical studies support the predictions of these theories, suggesting that language acquisition is a more complex process than many have proposed.

Chunking theories of language acquisition constitute a group of theories related to statistical learning theories, in that they assume that the input from the environment plays an essential role; however, they postulate different learning mechanisms.

Empirical studies supporting the predictions of RFT suggest that children learn language through a system of inherent reinforcements, challenging the view that language acquisition is based upon innate, language-specific cognitive capacities.

Language acquisition has been studied from the perspective of developmental psychology and neuroscience, which looks at learning to use and understand language parallel to a child's brain development.