Language

The most tangible indication of our thinking power is language – our spoken, written, or gestured words and how we combine them as we think and communicate. Humans have long and proudly proclaimed that language sets us above all other animals. ”When we study human language,” asserted linguist Noam Chomsky (1972),” we are approaching what some might call the ‘human essense,’the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique” to humans.To cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (1990), language is “the jewel in the crown of cognition.” Whether spoken, written, or signed, language enables us to communicate complex ideas from person to person and to transmit civilization’s accumulated knowledge from generation to generation. The origin of language is a heavily debated topic. Just when and how our ancestors first began to use language and how that early protolanguage evolved into a more complex system will probably never be understood. Additional insights come from the study of how children acquire language. Many have called the acquisition of a language by a child the most difficult intellectual achievement in life. In all parts of the world, children begin to learn language at about the same age and in the same general stages. During the years between 2 and 5, a child learns approximately ten thousands words a day.Children need only a comparatively small stimulus to grow linguisticaly.The universality of children’s remarkable acquisition of language despite the “poverty of stimulus” leads to one of the central theories in the field of linguistics: the argument for mental grammar, which states that the expressive variety of language use implies that a language user’s brain contains unconscious grammatical principles (Jackendoff 1994,). The next logical question then is how we acquire these mental grammer? The argument for innate knowledge implies that the human brain contains a genetically determined specialization for language. There are several clues that point to the fact that children have a genetic head start, so to speak, on language acquisition. One clue is the universal stages of language acquisition all children exposed to language go through. This also may explain how children learn at such a rapid rate despite the “poverty of stimulus.” Errows demonstrate that children use more than immitation to constract massages. Frequently a child comes up with a sentence that would not have been learnd from any teacher. They are creating their own sentences without ever having a parent explain the purpose of a noun or a verb or other rules. The famous examples of feral children, raised without socialisation and therefore having permanently stunted language skilles, suggest there is a “critical period,” or a window of time, in which the brain’s language system is activated and preprogrammed for the acquisition of a language.This is also the language paradox. Toddlers can learn a language with greater ease than a professional linguist! All of these reasons point to the possibility of a biologically innate universal grammar that allows to construct mental grammars of any language in all cultures (Jackendoff 1994).