How do we learn language?

“From the very beginning, babies exert some influence, and often control, over their universe.” (Cattell: 2)

Another common form of pre-speech is called cooing. It seems like the infant is training his mouth muscles and speech organs. Most babies start to make cooing sounds when they are about two months. In contrast to crying, cooing “seems like a pleasurable activity.”(Cattell: 4) The baby produces an outcome of cooing sounds in various lengths. After another month, finally, the baby starts to produce “little chuckles and laughs.” (Cattell: 4) The baby starts to move his lips and tongue having fun by producing little sounds. While the movement of the speech organs is “comparable with the movement they’ll later make in actual speech” (Cattell: 4), the sounds are not “yet sounds belonging to the specific language that members of the baby’s family speak.” (Cattell: 4)

Nevertheless, cooing is more speech-like than crying.

2.2 Babbling stage

The babbling stage of an infant begins at several months of age, mostly after eight months (cp. Cattell: 4). This phase is characterized by the production of repeated syllables like ‘bababababa’. The child produces a number of different vowels and consonants. There are very few consonant clusters and some native speech sounds that are harder to pronounce such as /r/ and /th/ and that are still absent (cp. Linguistics 201). However, “the patterns become more complex and more varied as time goes on.” (Cattell: 4) Babbling continues a long time and is still being done by the baby even after having produced his first words.

2.3 One-word stage

“This stage is characterized by the production of actual speech sign.” (Linguistics 201) Some infants produce the first word when they are about 9 months, others a little later. It does not mean that the child will have trouble with language or that it is mentally retarded. Some parents start worrying when the first word is not produced in the common time frame, but research showed that later most of the children are on the same level - no matter in what month they said the first word.

Very often, you can hardly tell the difference between a short babble and a word. “Many babies do say what sounds like ‘Mum-mum’ as their first word”, because “they’re used to making sucking movements with the lips.” (Cattell: 5)

Another distinctive feature of the one-word stage is the simplification of words: “du” for duck and “ba” for bottle (cp. Linguistics 201). “Up to about 18 months, new words are added only slowly.” (Cattell: 5)

The infant is imitating the family members and the child is able to extend his/her vocabulary up to 50 words. Those first words are mostly linked to important persons, food and “highlights of the daily routine such as baths.” (Linguistics 201) So there is the time where the parents could take notes and are aware of the words they heard by their baby. But suddenly, this slow language acquisition changes into an explosive add-on of words, which “is often referred to as a ‘vocabulary explosion’.” (Cattell: 6)

Even though a single word is not seen as a sentence and therefore has no syntax, some linguists claim that the single word stands for a whole sentence, that is why the one word stage is also referred to as the ‘one word holophrastic stage’. Cattell explains that a word can be pronounced differently by the baby depending on if it is more a question or a statement. If the child wants to ask about an object, it will use a rising intonation while pronouncing the word. If the child just wants to inform somebody about a fact, we would hear a falling intonation. To analyze the one word phase is very difficult because it takes a lot of imagination to see what the child wants and what he/she is trying to say. I find it very interesting that even though children’s language is simpler than adult’s language, it is not easier to study after all.

To sum this up, we could retain that in the one-word stage, the child says first true words (9-12 months), appears to recognize words like daddy, bye-bye, and mamma, it shows interest in sounds of objects and recognizes the names of some common objects. The baby appears to understand simple questions and tries to imitate new words.

2.4 Two-word stage

At about 18 months, the child goes from a handful of words to 250-300 words. This usually starts in the one-word stage and develops even more in the two-word stage. Combining two words together, children use some regularity: It is remarkable that some verbs or prepositions are used very often and at the same position in the two-word utterance. For example, see, allgone, off and come are words that reoccur a lot in children’s speech. They tend to use it in the following ways: “see sock, see boy, see light” or “sock off, shoe off, pants off” (Cattell 2000: 9). It seems like the child has a rule in its head that whenever sock occurs with the preposition off, the noun sock will stand first. Is a verb such as see involved, the noun sock is placed in second position.

Moreover, the child uses names a lot and combines it with objects or actions that belong or refer to a certain person. For example “Mummy shoe” or “Daddy go” (Cattell: 9). Therefore, this stage is highly context depending.

2.5 Multiple-word stage

By two and a half years, most children speak in sentences of several words. As I have indicated before the vocabulary explosion occurs at about 18 months, after that it is not possible to differentiate between a three-word, four-word or a five-word stage, because the child’s speech develops to fast from that point on. Therefore, we call it the multiple-word stage or one could say the “All hell breaks loose stage.” (Linguistics 201) It is a quite impressive development from the simple two-word stage to longer and grammatically correct sentences or questions. “It is claimed that by the age of 4, most children acquiring English have mastered the central structures of English syntax.” (Cattell: 12) Surprisingly fast, children can construct complex questions such as “What did you ask me to do?” or “Who was Daddy with?” (Cattell: 13) and have control over active and passive sentence constructions as well.

The child understands differences in meaning (up and down; in and out) and follows requests or directions. It has a word for almost everything and directs attention or asks for objects by naming them. The child will ask plenty of “why”, “what” and “who” questions and can live out his/her curiosity.

Since the baby is born, there are phonological, lexical and grammatical developments. When the infant reaches the multiple-word stage, the morphological development grows a lot. As an example, let us look at the past tense: There are several stages of a learning process to acquire the correct use of the simple past in English. The verb to go has an irregular past tense, but the child is not born with a list of all the verbs that do not follow the rules.

Still, the chances that the child uses it correctly are high, because it heard it somewhere and remembers the word without a certain rule to the past tense. As the child grows a little older and realizes the rule-based nature of verb ends in past tense, he/she tends to overextension of the grammatical morpheme “-ed” and produces words such as goed or wented. The child wants to show that he is aware of the rule.

Then there is the last stage of learning development in that specific case: The child realizes that there are exceptions to the rule and starts to be aware of them.

When the child turns six, his/her grammar equals that of an adult (cp. Linguistics 201).

3. The main theories of first language acquisition

After I have looked at the different stages of language development, I intend to point out the theories of first language acquisition. We know that language is learned and that humans talk, but how does it start? How are we able to learn our language? Is the ability to learn language innate? Do we just imitate our parents and memorize only words we hear to save them in our head? Are there any pre-conditions for language acquisition besides exposure to language?

Do we teach our children to talk or does the majority only believes so - even though linguist research indicates the opposite?

There are many questions that linguists and psychologists dealt with and that are still not answered to a satisfactory amount.

First language acquisition is a very mysterious topic. Not everything is black or white; you have to try to get your own opinion about it.

3.1 The behaviorists Bloomfield and Skinner

They have a quite simple concept of explaining first language acquisition: children learn everything by imitating their parents and repeating what they hear. “Language, like any other behavior, could be “explained” as just another set of responses.” (Bruner 1983: 32) The behaviorist view was very popular in the 40’s and 50’s, but challenged since imitation alone was not believed to be the only reason for language acquisition (cp. Linguistics 201). The behaviourists tell us that the children only imitate the adults and memorize the words, but how can they disregard the fact that children often make grammatical mistakes? Does that mean that adults make many mistakes when they talk to each other or to the child? I am sure that the children did not hear their parents say “Candy is gooder than apples” or “We goed to the park”. Another argument against the behaviorist belief is that “not all social groups adapt their speech to young children.” (Timothy Didactics 2) In Samoa, adults usually do not speak to the children and in some black communities in the USA it “is considered a waste of time to speak to children who are too young to give sensible replies.” (Timothy Didactics 2) However, those children also acquire a language. This must indicate that children do not just repeat the language they hear around themselves. It also seems that Bloomfield did only think about language as words, but not too much as a grammatical system. (Bruner: 32) says about the behaviorists opinion that “language learning was assumed to be much like […] nonsense syllable learning, except that it might be aided by imitation, the learner imitating the performance of the “model” and being reinforced for correct performance.” As we figured out before, though, children also say things that they have not possibly heard before. Bruner indirectly suggests that the behaviorists should put more emphasis on the grammar than on words only (cp. Bruner: 32).

Even though this empiricist approach of first language acquisition lasted a long time from Saint Augustine to B. F. Skinner’s more recent ascertainment in “Verbal Behavior” with its inclusion of reinforcement and conditioning, the common sense of people wanted to get rid of it. It was time for the Chomskyan revolution (cp. Bruner: 32).  

3.2 Generativist Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential and best-known linguists of the second half of the Twentieth Century (cp. Timothy Didactics 1).

He postulates that children are born with an innate capacity for learning language. He claimed that “the acquisition of the structure of language depended upon a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) that had as its base a universal grammar or a “linguistic deep structure” that humans know innately and without learning.” (Bruner: 33) Chomsky believes that there was neither special communication to an adult nor nonlinguistic knowledge of the world needed to learn a language (cp. Bruner: 33). The only condition for language learning is the exposure to it.  In other words, Chomsky says that there is a child’s competence that is there from the start, which is innate, and performance, which is the realization of language in utterance of speech. Therefore, we are born with a set of rules in our heads.

Bruner thinks of Chomsky’s assumption as extreme, but also as a means of freeing “a generation of psycholinguists from the dogma of association-cum-imitation-cum-reinforcement.” (Bruner: 33)

Some people mistake Chomsky’s innateness theory as the claim that we are born with language. That cannot be said in this way. In Chomsky’s opinion, the LAD is “a series of syntactic universals, structural properties universally found in all languages.” (Linguistics 201) Words must be learned, we are not born with a large set of vocabulary in our heads. Only the syntactic structures of the LAD are inborn. We are born with the curiosity of language and with the ability to learn the language that is spoken around us. Thus, “children generate sentences based on learned words and innate syntactic patterns”. The problem with the innateness theory is not the theory itself, because the ability to learn a language is definitely innate, but to decide “what the mysterious language acquisition device actually is.” (Linguistics 201)

During childhood, there is a period when the human brain is most ready to receive input and learn a particular language. This is known as the critical period. Between the age of two and six language acquisition takes place quite easily.

The critical period suggests that every child exposed to language will learn it when it reaches the critical period by the age of six. “If this is true, any child not hearing language during this period not only should not learn to speak but also should not be able to learn to speak” (Dr. Goodword). Cases like Genie or the wild boy of Aveyron, Victor, support Chomsky’s innateness theory including the critical period hypothesis. I will say more to those cases in chapter number 5.

Chomsky argues that children do not simply copy the language they hear, because “the language they hear is highly irregular […] or even ungrammatical” (Linguistics 201). Interestingly, recent linguistic studies have found out that the language around the child has not many errors after all. Nevertheless, let us just think for a moment that Chomsky was right with his claim that language around children is ungrammatical.

In my opinion, Chomsky, who is clearly opposed to the behaviorists, actually gives a pro-argument for their view. I am sure that this was not the intent of Chomsky and other linguists or researchers do probably not see it like this, but it was something that came to my mind. Therefore, Chomsky says that the children cannot learn language from repetition because the adult language is full of mistakes. If parents produce those errors in speech, wouldn’t that be an explanation for the children also making mistakes? When they are imitating their parents, it makes normal sense, that the children also repeat mistakes and that is why they learn language but also make errors when they talk.

I thought that Chomsky’s statement links to the behaviorist view in some sort of way. If you ignore for a moment that children make mistakes that I myself believe no adult would make, Chomsky’s statement that adult language is irregular and not mistake free, indirectly serves as an approval of the imitation theory. In general, Chomsky is clearly against the behaviorist view and believes that children deduce rules from the language they hear, “which they can then use to produce sentences that they have never heard before.” (Timothy Didactics 1)

Taking in account again that the language a child hears is not fragmented or inaccurate, this proves again that the language’s grammar and structures are not innate, “the capacity to learn language is.” (Linguistics 201)

3.3 Psychologist Jean Piaget

The cognitive psycholinguistic is concerned primarily with the way thought, language and speech are related. Piaget “views language acquisition within the child’s broader intellectual development.” (Linguistics 201) I am sure that there is some link between the cognitive development of a child and first language acquisition, but this theory does not explain language acquisition! “Piaget’s theory helps explain the order in which certain aspects of language are acquired.” (Linguistics 201) Therefore, the cognitive theory is not that helpful if we are wondering what is really happening when and how children learn a language. All children “regardless of their other talents and general intellectual ability” (Linguistics 201) do acquire language. Some learn faster, some start a little late, but all succeed learning language until a certain age. “Even a severely retarded child will acquire a native language without special training.” (Linguistics 201)

 

3.4 Comparison of the three theories

I described the three main theories of language acquisition in order to answer the question that the paper is about: How do we learn a language? Now it is on us to look at the information above and the different opinions of researchers and try to find an answer that we feel comfortable with.  When I looked at the theories and thought about them, it felt impossible to decide for only one of them. After a while, I found it not necessary to choose one of them anymore. I started to believe that the ‘solution’ might be somewhere in between. Of course, it seemed to me that some ideas make more sense that others, but overall, I would not call one theory entirely wrong.

For me, the cognitive theory stands out apart from the others. This theory does not explain language acquisition itself but gives important facts of prerequisites: “Cognitive development is an essential prerequisite for linguistic development. But language acquisition doesn’t occur spontaneously because of cognitive development.” (Linguistics 201)

The behaviorist theory seems to be very old fashioned and demonstrates patterns that are part of language acquisition such as imitation and repetition. I think that children indeed imitate their parents or brothers and sisters and that they learn from that. I am sure they can repeat words and save them in their grammatical patterns. However, I cannot agree with it completely because I do not think that this is the only way infants acquire language. I found out earlier that in some cultures adults do not talk to children very often and that those children - even without the possibility of imitating - learn the native language.

Children who are more exposed to language than others might learn a language faster, but a certain input is not essential for learning language.

In my opinion, the only fact that is definite about language acquisition is that the child needs to be exposed to language.  I read about “Akhbar’s experiment” and it convinced me: Akbar who was a Mogul emperor of India in the 16th century, “desired to learn whether language was innate or acquired through exposure to the speech of adults.” (Linguistics 201)  Therefore, he put two infants together with a mute nurse and had only her take care of them. The children did not learn how to talk, which indicates that language “does not simply emerge spontaneously in the absence of exposure to speech.” (Linguistics 201) All those findings point out more and more that Chomsky’s innateness theory is the one that gets very close to the actual language acquisition process.

It is possible to learn language when we are exposed to it, because we have a LAD that is accountable for a fast and successful language acquisition. All infants “regardless of environmental factors and differences in intelligence, are able to acquire very complex grammars at a very early age.” (Linguistics 201)

Still, I think that children also need to learn through experiences. Maybe it is not necessary, but I believe reactions and input from parents are something very important to a successful development of a child. I think that the capacity of language learning is innate, but it does not feel right to say that there are no other factors involved in it. Moreover, we have noticed that Chomsky is certainly incorrect in his claim that children do not hear well-formed, accurate language. They do and might profit more from that than Chomsky wants to admit. On the other hand, I do not believe in the repetition theory. I doubt that children learn a language like that. Here, I agree with Chomsky and his statement that children deduce rules from adult’s speech and those help them formulate new sentences that they have not heard before.

Again, I am at a point where I have to say that a combination of theories make more sense than each one alone. All three theories are “probably correct to a degree; each describes particular facets of a complex phenomenon.” (Linguistics 201) I would like to mention another linguist, because he tries to explain with his crosslinguistic study how children acquire language. Slobin introduces a number of practical strategies about what children are doing while learning language. Chomsky, however, does not believe that knowledge of grammatical structure can arise by application of step-by-step operations (cp. Slobin 1986: 1159).

I find that except Chomsky’s disbelief in Operating Principles, their claims and theories actually fit together quite well. I think you could see the Operating Principles as something innate as well, which “exist prior to the child’s experience with language.” (Slobin: 1160) Those principles can be used from the beginning on to construct a grammar.  Maybe those strategies are not what is innate, but “an inherent definition of the general structure and function of language” (Slobin: 1243) is. In Slobin’s opinion, children use strategies or Operating Principles like “Pay attention to the end of words” (Slobin: 1164), “Pay attention to the beginning of a unit” (Slobin: 1166) or “Pay attention to stress” (Slobin: 1166) when acquiring a language. Slobin lists quite a number of principles including storage, mapping, and interruption. Slobin’s attempt of sketching out the “Language-Making Capacity” (Slobin: 1244) by a set of principles that the child might be using to process his language seems logical and understandable. However, Slobin’s Operating Principles can be seen rather as descriptions of what children do when they learn language than real explanations of how they are capable of acquiring language. Slobin does not give certain answers to the innateness theory, nor does he focus on aspects of input.

All in all, the mystery of language acquisition has not been answered to complete satisfaction.

4. The “Input theory”

By now, we went through the main three theories and I would like to look at another theory of first language acquisition that only holds the input responsible for our language learning development.

4.1 Parental Input

Do we teach our children to talk? Since we always speak the language of our family members, they must have help us learn to speak our mother tongue language. Many people believe in that because it seems plausible (cp. Cattell: 31). Cattell, however, is very certain that this is not the way children learn language. Of course a baby might imitate the first words, but I also doubt that a child functions as a “human tape recorder” (Cattell: 39) for the first years of its life. I mean, nobody remembers their parents explaining the rules for past tense or for future use. Why? Because it has never happened. Now children do not learn language from their parents directly, but maybe parental input is a means that helps children acquire language.

Research of the last years have pointed out that “parents play a far more active role in language acquisition than simply modeling the language and providing [ …] input for a Language Acquisition Device.” (Bruner: 38)

Parents talk to their children in a way that orientates on the child’s process. The style of speech that the mother uses is called ‘motherese’. There is the term ‘fatherese’ as well, but most “linguists prefer to call it ‘caretaker talk’ “(Timothy Didactics 2). In the following, I will specify some characteristics of this way of talking:

• usage of simplified grammar and meaning
• the use of shorter sentences
• repetition of sentences
• slower speech
• formulation of questions with high rising intonation in order to receive feedback

(cp. Timothy Didactics 2)

The psychologist Bruner claims parents to be a language acquisition support system (LASS) (cp. Timothy Didactics 2). Bruner also (cp. 27) states that social interaction is self-rewarding and plays a big role in language acquisition.

Just think about “withholding social response” (Bruner: 27) to a child’s action and what harm that does. It will cause tears and after a while even incertitude.

4.2 The mother as a language acquisition device (LAD)

If Chomsky’s innateness theory is correct, modeling frequency might facilitate “the operation of innate mechanisms” and “should not be a variable relevant to the progress of language acquisition.” (Forner 1979: 17)

If we could prove that modeling frequency does “determine the direction that language will take,” the LAD and its hypothesis “would have to be modified or abandoned.” (Forner: 18)

“Despite all efforts to the contrary” (Forner: 18), several studies have shown influences of parental input and frequency on the child’s language. I would like to mention one research study by Brown (1973) where the parental frequencies and order of acquisition were compared using the example of three children named Adam, Eve and Sarah. According to the results at the chart, there were correlations between Sarah and her parents and Eve and her parents:

If you have a look at the summed ranks of parents and children for frequencies and order of acquisition of bound- and process morphemes, you would have to assume that “parental frequency does correlate with acquisition order.” (Forner: 20)

Moreover, parents use more simple forms when the child is young and increase the complexity when the child grows up (cp. Forner: 20). Therefore, language acquisition order has also to do with the complexity of the input.

Until now, it seems logical and almost proven that there is a definite correlation between modeling frequency and order of the child’s language acquisition.

Nevertheless, the interpretation of all those findings face difficulties, because the results “cannot prove a direct relationship between what mothers say and what children learn, because most of them are group studies conducted in a laboratory only once.” (Forner: 20) People can only assume that there is a correlation.

Snow (1974), for example, “argues that these studies should lead to an abandonment of the strong innateness hypothesis because they indicate that language acquisition is guided by the cognitive development of the child and the result of a process of constant interaction between mother and child to which both contribute equally, […].” (Forner: 21) But Farewell (1973) is convinced that there is no “usefulness of parental input to the process of language learning.” (Forner: 21) In her opinion, studies that claim to have proven the correlation of parental frequency and the child’s order of acquisition only show that “the child’s language highly affects […] the language of the adult, [...].” (Forner: 21)

Savic’s investigation of a pair of Yugoslav twins, however, supports Farwell’s opinion. “Savic (1975) investigated the same variables, comparing month by month the acquisition of questions […] with the questions addressed to these children by their parents, […].” (Forner: 21) Here, the findings were that “the order in which adults asked the children questions does not correspond to the order in which questions appeared in the children’s speech.” (Forner: 21) For example, the children used more questions of a certain type than the adults had asked them.

In my opinion, there is not enough research done in the field of parental input and the effect of modeling frequency.

Overall, I believe that no matter how much effort linguists will put into that kind of research and no matter how well defined the results are there will always be one hurdle to jump: to prove that adult language and its modeling frequency has direct influence on the child’s order of acquisition. Maybe brain research would have to be more involved.

5. Language learning in extreme situations

What happens if parents discourage children to use language will show the case study in this chapter. There are cases that suggest that children who have hardly experience with language until a certain age “will never completely master one.” (Timothy Didactics 3) Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, was found when he was eleven years old and he “never learnt to speak.” (Timothy Didactics 3) He was able to understand and read a little though. There are different cases of children who did not learn a language until they were found, some of them were so called wolf children, others did not experience any social life and the most striking case is that of a girl named Genie that has been kept like in a prison.

5.1 Genie: The case history

“Genie was born in April 1957.” (Curtiss 2004:127) When she was found in Los Angeles, she was 13 years old, but appeared to be a lot younger. Genie “did not speak, cry or produce any vocal sounds.” (Curtiss: 127) She had been kept in a small room with hardly any contact to the family and, therefore, “she had suffered physical and social isolation.”(Laughlin 1984: 51) Genie’s father punished her “if she made any sounds” (Curtiss: 127) and her mother treated her like a baby during the entire childhood: Genie was fed infant food, she had a baby chair and a crib (cp. Curtiss: 127).

Nobody talked to her and because she was alone and there was “no television or radio in the home” (Curtiss: 127), Genie did not learn how to speak.

5.2 Genie’s language development

Did Genie acquire any language during her isolation? If we stay within the Chomskyan concept of competence and performance (cp. 3.2 p. 11), one could say that Genie just had no talking practice and that is why “physiological and psychological factors were preventing her from using this knowledge to produce speech.” (Curtiss: 128) The question that emerged was whether Genie’s inability was a “performance deficit” (Curtiss: 128) or that it even meant that she had no competence of language at all. The hope was that Genie was able to understand language and that she had to learn to “utilize her knowledge” only. (Curtiss: 128)  But the people working with her found out that she did not have any linguistic competence and so Genie “was faced with the task of first- language acquisition, a task normally completed before age  five.” (Curtiss: 128)

They worked with Genie and observed her for a longer time and even though her language development was slower than that of normal children, there is no doubt that she acquired language skills.  “Genie learned to combine words in three- and four-word strings and could produce negative sentences, strings with locative nouns, noun phrases, possessives, and plurals.”(Laughlin 1984: 52) The size of her vocabulary was growing much faster than that of other children acquiring language at the same developmental level. On the other side, her syntactic acquisition was slower than that expected from normal children: “The two-word stage, which normally lasts from two to six weeks, lasted for more than five months.” (Curtiss: 138) On the contrary, Genie “acquired color words and numbers very early, had a 200-word vocabulary at the 2-word stage” (Laughlin: 52) compared to the normal child’s knowledge of 50 words at that stage.

On the one hand, Genie’s language development was slower and less successful than that of normal children; on the other hand, there were areas where Genie’s language appeared “to be more sophisticated, cognitively, than is found in normal language acquisition.” (Curtiss: 138)

5.3 The critical period hypothesis in a new angle

At the beginning, many people who were working with Genie “were convinced that she was going to demonstrate the falsity of the critical period hypothesis.” (Timothy Didactics 3) The reason for that was that she showed progress in language development and the people ‘training’ her believed that she might need a little longer or that her language development will differ a little from that of other children’s. “One year after her escape, her language resembled that of a normal 18-20 month old child.” (Timothy Didactics 3)

Then a big problem occurred: Genie seemed to not get into the “All hell breaks loose stage”, the point where vocabulary explosion and development of complex grammar starts.

Suddenly, it felt like she was stuck in the middle of acquiring important language features and grammar. “Four years later, she still had not mastered negation […] and she was unable to learn that she should say ‘Hello’ in response to ‘Hello’, and was unable to understand ‘Thank you’.” (Timothy Didactics 3) Genie’s language development stopped: She was not able to learn language like a younger child would have. She had lots of trouble with grammar and producing WH - questions. Especially pragmatic meanings of word phrases were impossible to teach her.

“Although she craved social contact, she was unable to achieve it through language.” (Timothy Didactics 3) The critical period hypothesis seems to be proven: Genie did not acquire language completely. However, “the evidence from research with Genie suggests that children as old as 13 can acquire many language skills in spite of previous deprivation.” (Laughlin 1984: 52) In my view, the critical period is not entirely proven, because Genie actually did acquire several language skills. It depends how strictly you define the critical period. If you say/think it means that children who have not learned language until they are six, are not capable of learning a language completely, the hypothesis may considered to be correct. But if the hypothesis ought to claim that children after that time cannot learn language at all, the critical period theory is not right.

We do not have many cases in which children start to learn language after six years old and that is why it is difficult to judge about the critical period hypothesis.

Even though many people see Genie’s case as prove for the hypothesis, we do not have to believe “in the notion that language capacity atrophies from disuse and cannot be restored after a “critical period”.” (Laughlin: 52)

6. Conclusion

The way communication takes place and the quality of input between the child and his or her parents must account “for how language comes to be learned.” (Painter 1989: 7) I am glad that there are some researchers and results that underline the importance of parental input. Spolsky (1979:175) mentions in his comparative study of first and second language acquisition that “children in U.S. middle-class homes produce more sounds than lower income children.”

That indicates that social class can also influence first language acquisition.

Especially after the case of Genie, I believe that parental input and “exposure to language at a certain stage in the child’s development” (Curtiss 2004: 140) play an important role. In my view, you cannot explain first language acquisition with just one theory. Language itself is very multi-faceted and language learning is a complicated and long process.

In my opinion, the existence of many external factors does not have to be judged negatively, but rather seen as an advantage and a chance for the development of first language acquisition. Many additional factors can influence many different ways of improving and learning language. Maybe one factor can substitute another missing factor and leads to compensation.

I think that nowadays many things are possible and we can hope that there are ways to acquire language also after the critical period. At least, we know that, even after extreme situations, the chances of learning some language skills are high and I believe that this is something to be proud of, too. Actually, it is praise to the intelligence of humans and the methods of language teaching.

7. Bibliography

Books

1. Brinton, Laurel (2000): The Structure of Modern Language. A Linguistic Introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

2. Bruner, Jerome (1983): Child’s Talk. Learning to Use Language. Oxford University Press.

3. Cattell, Ray (2000): Children’s Language. Consensus and Controversy. London: Continuum.

4. Curtiss, Susan et alii. (2004): “The Linguistic Development of Genie.“ First Language Acquisition. The Essential Readings. Eds. Barbara C. Lust & Claire Foley. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

5. Forner, Monika (1979):”The mother as LAD: Interaction between order and frequency of parental input and child production.” Studies in First and Second Language Acquisition. Eds. Fred R. Eckman &Ashley J. Hastings. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House Publishers Inc.

6. Mc Laughlin, Barry (1984): Second Language Acquisition in Childhood: Volume 1. Preschool Children Second Edition. Hillsdale, New Jersey London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

7. Painter, Clare (1989): Learning the mother tongue. Oxford University Press.

8. Slobin, Dan Isaac (1986): The crosslinguistic study of Language Acquisition Volume 2: Theoretical Issues. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers Hillsdale, New Jersey.

9.  Spolsky, Bernard (1979):”The comparative study of first and second language acquisition.” Studies in First and Second Language Acquisition. Eds. Fred R. Eckman &Ashley J. Hastings. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House Publishers Inc.

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3. Timothy Mason: Didactics 1.Introduction. Learning Language.

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4. Timothy Mason: Didactics 2.The Evidence from Neurology and from First Language Acquisition.

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5. Timothy Mason: Didactics 3.The Evidence from Acquisition in Extreme Conditions ( accessed 15/02/09)

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6. World language statistics and facts

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