Factors that Govern The Acquisition of Language

Many parents, parents to be and even students studying Linguistics think about how infants acquire the human language. As a child grows older right after birth, they are filled with great determination and excitement to learn the different sounds, words and sentences to fully learn and understand the human language. According to research in this article, there are three factor’s that governs the acquisition of language which are: the discovery of the units of language, packaging words into meaningful units and language acquisition as creation.

In discovering the units of language infants has a great role to play. Before an infant begin to connect words to objects, they must establish which sound sequences are words, this is possible through their native language from continuous sounds where there is pauses. Even though there are different forms of language it shows that an infant must go through a critical period of acquiring language, this is called first language acquisition. Despite these factors, infants can successfully divide words from fluent speech from approximately 7 months of age. However, according to research on the theorist Noam Chomsky he argued that, “language is an innate faculty, and we are born with a set of rules about language in our minds, which he referred to as ‘universal grammar’”. He believed that an infant doesn’t copy the language they hear around them, but, they deduce rules from it, which they can then use to produce sentences that they have never heard before. (Tahiriri, 2012).

Children package words into meaningful units. Although distributional analyses enable children to break into the words and phrases of a language, many higher linguistic functions cannot be acquired with statistics alone. Children must discover the rules that generate an infinite set, with only a finite sample. They evidently possess additional language-learning abilities that enable them to organize their language without explicit guidance, because Chomsky believed that children at birth, are born with a “language acquisition device” which allowed them to formulate rules of language based on the input they received”. (Tahiriri, 2012). These abilities diminish with age and may be biologically based. It can be argued that according to Piaget “the unit is the word and the child learns what words refer to and how to combine them. In the behaviourist account, “there is no complex system of internalized rules, either innately given or acquired through development, but a system of habit strengths” (Tahriri, 2012)

Every child goes through a period where they acquire language. During this period, children discover the combinations in the sounds of their language and learn how they are arranged into combinations, and map these combinations into meaning. These processes unfold together, requiring children to merge their capacities as they learn, to crack the code of communication that surrounds them. Despite layers of complexity, each currently beyond the reach of modern computers, young children readily solve the linguistic puzzles facing them, even surpassing their input when it lacks the expected structure. Natural experiments in which children are faced with minimal language exposure can reveal the extent of inborn language-learning capacities and their effect on language creation and change. However, it can be argued that, “even though a child would go through that first language acquisition period through their native language, later in life as they become older, they can become bilingual through acquiring another language and master it as well, this is called second language acquitision”. (Mihalicek, Wilson, 2007)

In conclusion, this article can be concluded that language acquisition had various aspects that a child must go through to acquire language and the acquiring of language doesn’t stop at childhood but acquiring language can continue through adulthood if a person desires to acquire another language, other than the one they acquired at their childhood. There are also many theories we can look at and understand when it comes to the acquisition of language to have a better understanding of language because it is a complex circumstance.