”) In German, you can put noun after noun together to form giant compound words in Chinese, the pitch of your voice determines the meaning of your words in American Sign Language, you can convey full, grammatical sentences with tense and aspect by moving your hands and face. In English, an adjective comes before a noun (“red house”), whereas in Spanish, the adjective comes after (“casa roja. The Structures of LanguageĪll languages have underlying structural rules that make meaningful communication possible. Every language is different. There are many components of language that will now be reviewed. Moreover, it appears that there is a critical period for language acquisition, such that this proficiency at acquiring language is maximal early in life generally, as people age, the ease with which they acquire and master new languages diminishes (Johnson & Newport, 1989 Lenneberg, 1967 Singleton, 1995). It would seem, therefore, that we are born with a biological predisposition to acquire a language (Chomsky, 1965 Fernández & Cairns, 2011). The use of language develops in the absence of formal instruction and appears to follow a very similar pattern in children from vastly different cultures and backgrounds. Noam Chomsky (1965) criticized this behaviorist approach, asserting instead that the mechanisms underlying language acquisition are biologically determined. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement. However, young children master language very quickly with relative ease. Given the remarkable complexity of a language, one might expect that mastering a language would be an especially arduous task indeed, for those of us trying to learn a second language as adults, this might seem to be true. This level of information processing is incredibly impressive in anyone, much less someone still figuring out counting and skipping! Yet when they do start to talk, children begin to follow grammatical rules and apply them to form new, innovative phrases. Regardless of how much a child is spoken to, they will not hear every possible word and sentence by the time they begin speaking. Not only are children able to absorb the complicated rules of grammar without formal teaching, they do so from a limited vocabulary.
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