Language Acquisition in Infants and Young Children

What We Learn in Our First Five Years

The capacity for language acquisition in the very young is quite simply astonishing. In just a handful of years, most children in any culture around the world are capable of progressing from knowing nothing about any language to becoming fluent in their native language; proficient enough to make their speech understood in a grammatically acceptable way. While nearly every child does this, it is a feat that very few adults are able to duplicate, even when already familiar with one or more languages. When learning a second, or perhaps third, language, one must mainly concentrate on acquiring the syntax, semantics, and to a lesser extent phonology - or grammar, meaning and rules of sound - of that language. Children don't have the advantage that would allow them to relate a new language to one already established, however, and must also learn the pragmatics, or socially acceptable contexts, and rules of sound from the beginning in conjunction with syntax and semantics. Despite these handicaps, children regularly outperform adults in language acquisition. Various theories have been proposed to explain this, from Eric Lenneberg's "critical periods of development" to Noam Chomsky's inside-out developmental theory, which proposes an innate linguistic ability in all humans, present from birth. These and others will be explored in the following pages along with what children do learn, linguistically, up to the age of five.