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The process that a child’s brain needs to acquire a language

Kensy Valle

Bachelor's degree in teaching English, National Pedagogical University “Francisco

Morazán”

LIN2005: Reading and writing workshop.

Miss Sandra Alvarado

March 02, 2023

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The process that a child’s brain needs to acquire a language

How children learn a language if they don´t know nothing about it? “There is an innate

mechanism in the human brain that helps children acquire language” (Chomsky 1957, p. 4), a

relationship between cognitive development and language acquisition has been debatable.

Language acquisition has stimulated many studies to date and consequently there have been

differing views in what is innate in language acquisition. Because infants have innate abilities to

pick up a language acquire a language have various process in which children have to develop,

such as time, experience. Also, they must to expand their vocabulary, however “the vocabulary

we typically understand is not sufficient to clarify how all the grammar laws are created that

children easily acquire” (Aktan- Erciyes, A. 2021, p. 16). Infant’s brain is able to acquire a

language due to complex strategies, phonetic perceptions, and speech hierarchical structures.

Infants demand a lot of knowledge and experience to speak a fluent speech, because children

need to practice words, nevertheless, the knowledge acquired by children is very extended. They

require associate this knowledge or sentences with their environment they acquire language

through interaction, infants learn better through interactions with people then through videos or

audio recordings, due to the mind responds to stimulus. They are able to learn the language more

naturally and easily than adults since children’s neural networks are developing and they are

more predisposed to discover new things and learn. (Lightfoot, 1999, p. 64; cited in Anderson,

2005, p. 3) claims that infants have “a rich system of knowledge without significant instruction

and despite a deficiency of experiential data”.

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Initial learning can alter future learning in view of that languages have grammar rules, when

children heard one of those rules in a word, they apply this rules in their speeches and as a result

this can affect their future vocabulary. Chomsky (1968, p. 97), points to the evidence that “babies

will say things they have never heard!”, for example, they can use phrases such as "The cats

eated the mouses" rather than "The cats ate the mice." It is assumed that babies have never heard

adults saying "eated" or "mouses," and therefore, “they could not just be imitating language they

have listened, moreover children’s performance includes things they have not produced before".

(Harmer, 2001, p. 69).

As the mother talks to her infant, she uses phrases to communicate, and the child can emulate

her mother to carry on having fun, Chomsky, (1994, p. 23) suggest that “child language

development is influenced by a complete set of relationships among several variables”. Friends or

family interactions, added to the affective bond that is formed with them, are a significant

prerequisite for the proper implementation of language. In the first two years of life,

environmental factors appear as the most determinant in favor of children's linguistic

development. However, that involve parents, they are the most important influence in this process

of learning, both the adult and child, the standard actions of adults in the home setting definitely

encourages children to understand their language.

Another factor is that infants locate the stressed syllable in familiar words, according to

(Harmer, 2001, p.69), “the result of having mental ability to process what we hear, challenging it

through the language-processing parts of our brain where rules in some way reside, and where all

input adds more information for the better functioning of that processor”, for this process infants

are able to discriminate words they perceiving vowels and consonants terms to produce their new
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vocabulary. Moreover, when they hear common sequences of syllables helps children draw

words out of what would otherwise be a random stream of syllables, children hear those sounds

together frequently and unconsciously learn that together they form a meaningful word.

From 6 months of age infants’ language abilities are found to increase, infants are already

processing multiword phrases such as “clap your hands”, therefore are made up a long string of

vowels and consonants. Children master their first language in a certain progression owing to at

this age they have already spent many months playing around with the sounds and intonations, as

well as connecting words with meanings, they recognize their own name, their development

happens months before parents hear their children’s first attempts at sequence of words. Infants

identify that they are referred to by that specific word, likewise mommy, daddy; moreover to

remember words, they repeat words, and this makes that children keep an interplay with their

language. Besides the phrases they use when start to talk are characteristic of people, objects,

animals, etc. This process of associating sounds with objects or people and, even if they don't

respond right away. Very soon their vocabulary expands bringing in other useful words, they

understand and are willing to learn new sounds and meanings before they say their first word,

besides children use different word roots and their vocabulary is better.

(Jakobson 1968, p. 8) also found that the order of the acquisition of sounds is innate, his

studies argue for an innate account, of course not in its pure form. The results showed that “some

distinctions are innate, accounting for universal performance with the 9 voiced-voiceless

distinction” (Tartter, 1998, p. 357), moreover, infants have the ability to instantly know how to

process the language, nobody teach them how to process sound and associate them with
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meanings, they bring that capacity since they born, as Chomsky (1968, p. 94) suggests that “the

human brain is innately wired for language learning”. Man is born equipped with the mental

Children acquire language in stages, and different children reach the various stages at

different times. The order in which these stages are reached. However, is virtually always the

same, and in these stages, they use patterns in language, children detect the behavioral patterns of

others, which helps them learn play patterns such as cooperation, turn taking, and exchanging

toys. Picking up on the behaviors of others enables children to respond appropriately, they learn

that certain pieces of information occur together more often than others. Besides they learn

language and social skills in part by picking up on patterns in their environment this allow that

the child learns what words refer to and how to combine them to keep a fluent speech.

The way that adults talk with infants help them to create their own rules in language. Chomsky

theorized that all children are born with some kind of language processor – a ‘black box’ or

‘language acquisition device’ – which allowed them to formulate rules of language based on the

input they received (Harmer, 2001, p. 69) “baby talk' that adults naturally use with infants and

toddlers tends to always be just a bit ahead of the level of the child's own language development”,

this 'baby talk' has simpler vocabulary and sentence structure than adult language, exaggerated

intonation and sounds, and lots of repetition and questions, they have already started learning

abstract language patterns and creating abstract language rules. All of these features help the

child to sort out the meanings, sounds, and sentence patterns of his or her language.
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Under a cognitive model of acquisition, they use hierarchical structuring with strings are better

able to explain the complex process, by constructing and testing hypotheses governing what

constitutes a possible “word, syllable”, or other supra-segmental constituent, many of the

observed “processes” in children can then be explained in terms of well-formedness constraints

on the internal composition of hierarchically structured constituents in the child's developing

grammar, the child associates the articulatory feature with the constituent of the word instead of

recognizing it as a segmental feature, their language is systematic and they are able to produce

structures which they had not been exposed to before.

Another important factor is that, they don’t learn exactly semantic structure of words, they are

guided by sentences they heard, they absorb all those information. "Much of the knowledge of

language is built into the human mind rather than acquired" (Johnson & Johnson, 1998, p. 169),

infants are not going to analyze grammar rules, they respond to multiword combinations of three

word sequences used in parent-child conversations, whereas that they just adapt the language in

their knowledge, they make their own ways to understand the language, besides all language

acquisition theories have “to attribute certain built-in properties to the mind, whether the ability

to associate stimulus and response, or the knowledge of principles and parameters” (Johnson &

Johnson, 1998, p. 170) the process they have for doing their own structures allow they are able to

produce structures which they had not been exposed to before, their language is systematic and

“Children do attend to word order and do structure their early sentences using the order most

frequent in the parent language” (Slobin and Bever, 1982; cited in Tartter, 1998, p. 9).

capacity, with an ear ready to hears, and a complex oral mechanism to express himself, infants

born prepared with all those aspects they need to acquire a language.
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To sum up, infant’s brain has the capacity to acquire a language, by applying children need

complex strategies to build their own structure phonetic perceptions, and speech hierarchical

structures. However, this development demands time to associate knowledge with their

environment, although if they don’t learn or adapt the correct way of words it could cause

problems with the form they express in the future, besides another aspect that can alter their

process of acquire a language is their environment, phrases of parents, family or parent’s friends

they use can modify their language. Children are able to identify words by phonetic structure,

they hear those sounds in together frequently and unconsciously learn that together they form a

meaningful word; additionally their vocabulary increase, they use different word roots and their

vocabulary is better; they acquire language in stages, in that way they can sort out the meanings,

sounds and sentence patterns of his or her language, they use hierarchical structures which they

had not been exposed to before, they just adapt the language in their knowledge, moreover the

acquisition of sounds is innate.

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Outline

Infant’s brain is able to acquire a language due to complex strategies, phonetic perceptions, and

speech hierarchical structures.

Acquire a language needs time and experience.

1. Infants demand a lot of knowledge and experience to speak a fluent speech.

2. Initial learning can alter the future learning.

3. Child language development is influenced by a complete set of relationships.

Acquire a language in infancy focus on phonetic perception.

1. Infants locate the stressed syllable in familiar words.

2. The order of the acquisition of sounds is innate.

3. From 6 months of age, infants’ language phonetic abilities are found to increase.

Infants use their own structures in the language.

1. Children acquire language in stages.

2. The way that adults talk with infants help them to create their own rules in

language.

3. They use hierarchical structuring.

4. They don’t learn exactly semantic structure of words.

5. The human brain is innately wired for language learning.

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References

 Anderson, D. (2005). Theories of first language acquisition. Retrieved from

http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/dwew2/li2/li2_contents.htm.

 Aktan-Erciyes, A. (2021). Understanding language acquisition: Neural theory of

language. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 17(2), 697-705. Doi:

10.52462/jlls.48

 Chomsky, Noam.  American Documentation; New York, N.Y. Tomo 8, N.º 4,  (Oct 1,

1957): 284.

 Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World

 Chomsky, N. (1994). The Human Language Series 2. G. Searchinger. New York:

Equinox Films/Ways of Knowing, Inc.

 Harmer, J. (2001). The practice of English language acquisition. (3rd ed.). Essex: Pearson

Education Ltd

 Johnson, K., & Johnson, H. (Eds.). (1998). Encyclopedic dictionary of applied linguistics.

Oxford: Blackwell Publishers

 Tartter, V. C. (1998). Language and its normal processing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage