So this might surprise you, but
one of the most amazing feats you'll ever accomplish as a
human being already happened, and that is language
development. I mean, think about it. When you're a baby, all these
sounds are coming at you, and somehow, you're
able to figure out which sounds are words,
where there are breaks between the words,
general grammatical rules, and you're able to
apply them without any real formal training. This is amazing. So naturally, a
lot of research has been done into how
this ability develops. And I'm going to tell you about
the three main theories that look at language development. So first, we start
out with the nativist, or innatist perspective. And what this
perspective says is that children are born with
the ability to learn language. And the main guy associated with
this theory is Noam Chomsky. And he thought the humans had
something called a language acquisition device, or
LAD, in their brains that allowed them
to learn language. And this isn't
really supposed to be in a specific part of the brain. It's just an idea that
this ability exists. And this works
because he thought that all languages shared
a universal grammar, or the same basic elements,
so all languages would have nouns, verbs,
things like that. So the language
acquisition device enables the child to
pick up on and understand those types of words
and their organization within a sentence
for any language. This goes along with
the idea that there is a "critical period"
or a "sensitive period." The "critical period"
is usually thought to be from birth until
about age eight or nine, and it's the period
of time in which a child is most able
to learn a language. So if you try to learn a
language after that age, it's a lot harder. It's not impossible. It's just a lot harder. And nativists like
Chomsky would say that that's because
the LAD only operates during that critical period. Once you start using it, then
it specializes to your language, and it becomes unable to
detect other sounds and grammar from other languages. The second theory I
want to tell you about is the learning theory. Learning theorists
think that children aren't born with anything. They only acquire language
through reinforcement. So a learning theorist would
say that a child learns to say "mama" because every time it
makes it sound that approaches that-- so "ma-something"--
then Mom starts smiling, hugging the child, so over
time, the child learns, oh, the more I make this sound,
the more I get hugs and smiles. And so then, eventually,
it learns to say "ma," and then say it again,
and learns to say "mama." So this makes sense. But a strict learning
theory doesn't explain how children are able
to produce words they've never heard before or produce
unique sentences. So we have another theory called
the interactionist approach. Sometimes this is called the
social interactionist approach, because these theorists believe
that biological and social factors have to interact
in order for children to learn language. So they would say
that children strongly desire to communicate
with others, such as the adults
in their lives, and that desire
motivates them to learn to communicate via language. And the main theorist associated
with this school of thought is Vygotsky. He was a big proponent
of the importance of social interaction in
the development of children. All three of these theories
have made big contributions to our understanding of how
children develop language. So the next time you look
at a baby, be impressed. They're actually
working really hard.