Language Acquisition

When you are born, you are immediately exposed to language.
You don’t understand it or know how to use it but its there. When you are a
baby you start off with your only form of communication being crying or
fussing. Young children are constantly learning and through watching their
parents or family talking they begin to build the foundation of language. It
starts out as babbles and loud shrieks but within around a year, babies start
to utter words and string them together.



















Infants can learn new words in as
little as five minutes after being shown representations of the word. But, they
tend to learn faster when it comes to things they are more interested in.
Experts say it’s not too different to everyone else, that we naturally enjoy
learning when the subject is something we are interested in.
It’s almost impossible for people to study whether people
have language inbuilt in them or if it is something completely reliant on
learning. Some experiments have been done with animals but the allure of the
‘forbidden experiment’ remains. ‘The forbidden experiment’ is the idea of
putting a child in isolation from birth and analysing it to see if language is
only acquired by learning from others, or if you develop language naturally.
All children ultimately learn language in the same way, by
copying other people, learning how to say words and finding out what they mean.
Proper language acquisition takes a long time and a lot of practice, but its
well worth it, being the most important type of communication worldwide.

Bibliography: http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/lang-acq.cfm