How Languages Are Acquired?

How Languages are Acquired?

When a baby comes into the world, his parents are very excited about everything that is related to their child, inmediatelly, parents start to to talk to the baby, although, their baby can not talk, and the only way the baby can communicate is craying, someday he will be able to communicate in any language. Then, there must be a way in which languages are acquired.

Language acquisition, like everything in the world, could not scape to men´s subjectivity. So, there are many different points of view about this topic. But, the main approaches are: Behavioristic, Nativistic, and Functionalist approaches. Behaviorists support that babies come into the world with a Tabula Rasa, in common words, their mind is in blank, it is like a kind of computer without any software installed. Then, babies “learn” by conditioning. Nativists think that language is something innate in all human beings; Chomsky said that humans have innate propeties that are embodied in a “Little black box” that he called LAD (Innate predisposition to acquire language). Functionalism point of view is that “language is a manifestation of the cognitive and affective ability to deal with the world, with others, and with the self” (Brown, 1980, p. 27); in other words, Language is acquired through social interaction.

In my personal opinion, all those theories have an Achilles heel that is criticized by other theory. But, but none of them can explain without gaps, the way language is acquired. I think that all theories have their share of reason, behaviorists suggest the imitation as a way in which children acquire language; this is true. I have a 5 year-old girl, and I remember her imitating my speech, even when played with her dolls; Behaviorism can explain very well the first levels in human language developement because when we are children we learns because we have a need, then we are conditined. but not the last level (sentence and discourse) can not be explainned by behaviorism, because in these levels we start to create new utterances. On the other hand, I agree with Nativists´ LAD theory, because language is something innate in human beings. Just humans can communicate through an articulate language, animals can not speak. Children not only imitate others, they also create new utterances as I said before, and, it is a fact, that language is originated in the brain, so this brain must have a biological mechanism for acquiring language. We can note that people with any damage in t the brain can not develope any language Finally the functionalist approach, I believe that language can not be acquired in isolation, definatelly, human beings need social interaction to acquire a language. In fact, there are researches that prove it. An example could be the case of genie (a feral child). She grew up in isolation, with no any social interaction, so she did not develope language well, she could pronunce just few

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