The Acquisition of

Language
By:
Innu Fitriansyah
Galih

A Biological Predisposition for

Language

If human language is a genetically based characteristic of humans,

represented and processed in the human brain, then it follows that a
human infant will acquire that system as its brain develops. Its called
the nativist model of language acquisition.

The nativist model of language acquisition is important, on contrary that

is not that humans acquire language without experience. Humans and
other animals, require environmental input to trigger or stimulate
development.

Developing brain provides the infant with a predisposition to acquire

language, but language acquisition will not happen in a vacuum. The
child must be exposed to external input to construct a grammar and a
lexicon with all the properties associated with human language.

A Biological Predisposition for

Language

Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a property of the childs brain that

endows it with a predisposition for acquiring language. The child,
exposed to language through the environment, processes the input
using biologically endowed systems for language acquisition (Universal
Grammar and acquisition strategies), and the eventual outcome is a
grammar and a lexicon.

A child acquires language is largely attributable to Universal Grammar

(UG), which is the general form of human language and is part of the
childs genetic makeup. Recall that all languages have a similar
organization of their respective grammars into phonological,
morphological, and syntactic components.

A Biological Predisposition for

Language

Child grammars never violate universal principles of language. For

instance, they will never contain rules that are not structure dependent
(Crain 1991). Nor will they allow the construction of sentences that
violate universal constraints on movement. Also we observe that
children set the parameters of their language very early.

Another part of the childs biological endowment is a set of acquisition

strategies that enable the child to take the input from the environment
and construct a grammar that conforms to the organizational principles
of UG. These strategies determine what will be the most salient and
easily acquired aspects of language.

Characteristics of the Language in

the Environtment

Positive evidence is a data that supplies the child needs in order to set
parameters and develop a grammar, to provide information about the
language the child is acquiring. The main providers of input are the
people who interact with the child: parents, caretakers, siblings, and any
other who make an interactions with the child.

Every child in every known culture acquires language with similar ease,
by going through similar stages at about the same rate. This implies
that any characteristics of the input in the environment that are
identified as essential for language development must exist in every
language community in the world.

Characteristics of the Language in

the Environtment

For example: Parents in the United States, consider interacting verbally

with the children to be very important, assuming that they teach
language to their children and that this sort of interaction is necessary
for language acquisition to take place.

Parents or caregivers need to provide linguistic input to their children,

and opportunities for interaction with the input enhance acquisition. A
theory about the role of the environment in language acquisition is the
notion that children acquire language by imitating their caregivers
language. A very old view of language acquisition was that the children
had to be rewarded when they said something correctly and not
rewarded when they said something grammatically incorrect.

Characteristics of the Language in

the Environtment

Parents and other primary caregivers generally feel that they have some
obligation to help their children acquire language, and might have the
intuition that correcting errors is important.

If rewarding correct behavior, encouraging imitation, and correcting

errors are not important, there are any aspects of the way parents speak
to children that might make difference.

The conjunct of these characteristics is referred to as infant-directed

speech or motherese. One important characteristic is prosodic: when
people talk to very small children, they tend to use an overall higher and
more variable pitch than when speaking to adults. Crosslinguistic studies
have shown that the prosody of infant-directed speech is similar in many
different cultures (Fernald 1994).