Darwin saw in the babble of young children that language is an instinctive tendency in humans, but that no child has an instinct "to brew, bake or even write". But the science behind language acquisition was not fully explored until the 1960s, when Noam Chomsky pioneered the field of linguistics, positing the existence of a "universal grammar" (like a computer programme in the brain that understands and builds sentences out of a finite number of words), which develops rapidly in children without formal instruction.
Children experience a grammar explosion, a period of several months in their third year of life, when they suddenly speak in fluent sentences. Up until then, there are several specific stages of language acquisition that invariably progress in the following order:
Children experience a grammar explosion, a period of several months in their third year of life, when they suddenly speak in fluent sentences. Up until then, there are several specific stages of language acquisition that invariably progress in the following order:
i) Syllable babbling
Between 5-7 months, babies tend to start using sounds universal to all languages, such as “ba-ba”, “dee-dee”, and to start to vary syllables by the end of the 1st year.
ii) One-word utterances
Then babies begin to understand and produce words, and our Rosie opted for “hiya” and “nana” (banana) first. Babies differ in how much they name objects or engage in social interaction, showing early character traits of a tendency to schmooze or explore the abstract world of objects.
iii) Two-word strings
At 18 months, there is an explosion as language takes off, at a minimum rate of a new word every 2 hours.
iv) All hell breaks loose!
By 3 years old, researchers have found that most children are speaking in grammatically correct sentences the majority of the time, especially in terms of word order. Although children may differ by up to a year in their rate of language development, the order of stages listed above always stays the same.
After 4, many errors by young speakers result from irregular verbs and plurals, i.e. I holded the baby, my tooths hurt. All irregular forms must be memorised, and this difficulty means they are slowly being eradicated from our language; Old and Middle English had about twice as many irregular verbs (chide, geld) as Modern English.
So what experiences interact with this in-built grammatical wiring (mentalese) to help babies become speakers? More than anything, what babies get from listening to their elders are the phonemes (units of sound), words and sentence order that characterise their own language community. Any fussy parent that thinks they can impart good grammar to their young child is simply misguided.
Throughout the early stages, a more crucial component of the speech directed at children by their parents (Motherese or Parentese) is the melody of vocalisations, for example:
i) rise-and-fall pattern when giving approval
ii) sharp, staccato bursts for prohibiting
iii) dramatic rise in tone when directing attention
iv) smooth, low murmurs when giving comfort
Scientists have shown that these patterns are common to many languages, and may even be universal. French researchers have also shown that babies are attuned to a certain language (its melody, stress and timing) in the womb.
In all humans, there is a crucial early phase (up to around age 6) when the language-learning circuity of the brain is especially plastic, and babies are especially good at picking up a foreign language during this period. Children remain good foreign language learners often until puberty, when body metabolism changes, and this evidence supports the initiative in the UK to teach languages like French at primary school level.
What happens to young humans completely deprived of a community language is a topic that has fascinated writers and filmmakers for years, with modern studies including L’Enfant Sauvage (Truffaut), a film by François Truffaut about the wild boy of Aveyron, the Enigma of Kasper Hauser, a film by Werner Herzog, and Paul Auster's New York Trilogy of books. Not forgetting Mowgli in the Jungle Book, of course. Sadly modern experience shows that such children would simply become mute.
In all of this, an important thing to remember is that languages do not shape their user’s way of thinking, and that we all have the same mentalese (brain grammar) at root. How this internal blueprint adapts to the sounds and speakers of the world around us as we grow up is the key to the uniqueness of the language we each speak.
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