It has been said that in their development of language, children begin to make sounds or say words by imitating what they hear. This is often by trying to say what their parents say, including pronunciation of the words and sounds, which also plays a part in a child’s acquisition of phonology. This is an important factor in a child’s learning to speak because through this the children could learn to make their first sounds, and also learn the relationships between words and objects. For example if they consistently hear a word and see their parent holding an object, they could soon be able to realise that the sound they are hearing is in fact what the object is. Although it is argued that a child is not exposed to enough language to merely imitate. Also it is evident that children tend to over extend words and call more than one object the name of another object, or over generalize words for example adding “ed” onto the end of words such as “falled”.
It has also been suggested that by careful teaching from the parent can be crucial within a child’s development. For example repetition from the parent towards the child, such as saying “Daddy” can make a child’s understanding of language develop quicker. But also this can by changing the language that they use when around the child. This sort of babyish talk is often called “caretaker speech” or “parentese”, but this use of babyish language would make it harder for the child to create sentences. The subjects and topics should be of which the child can understand, but if spoken in an adult manner the child would be able to make connections on how sentences are put together. Although it has been said that there is always a gap between understanding and meaning, where the child may imitate what they hear but not actually understand what they are saying.
Also the rules of grammar have been shown to be too complex for a child learning to speak, as they would not have yet gained the knowledge or understand the concept of Standard English. Although a theorist called Noam Chomsky has said that children everywhere, irrespective of their culture or mother tongue, learn at more or less the same pace and the critical period for a child’s language development is between two and seven. He also says that children in actuality use language more than they need to and seem resistant to correction, even if pushed by rewards, contradicting Skinner’s Behaviourist theory. He also says that children create forms of language without complete understanding, which is what leads to overgeneralization and overextension. Through these factors Chomsky came up with a theory saying that although some contribution from the parent was necessary by linguistic interaction with the child to help them learn to speak, there is a genetic element inherent in the human brain, which prepared young children for language acquisition. He called this theory the “Language Acquisition Device”.
