In his 1972 book, Language and Mind, linguist Noam Chomsky wrote, "When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the 'human essence,' the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man." Essentially, Chomsky asserts that language is one of the key characteristics that separates humans from all other animals.
The finer points of language evolution and development, however, remain mysterious. With the hard work of psychologists and linguists, understanding of human language progresses with each discovery. Certainly the most famous of language scientists is Noam Chomsky, whose theories have revolutionized contemporary understanding of language.
B.F. Skinner and Early Language Theory
Before Chomsky, B.F. Skinner, the founder of Behaviorism, had his own ideas about how children learn language.The school of Behaviorism claims that all behavior is learned and that humans enter the world with no innate abilities. He famously said, "Give me a child, and I'll shape him into anything."
With language, Skinner thought, it should be no different. In his 1957 book, Verbal Behavior, he attempted to explain language acquisition as nothing more than association, imitation, and reinforcement. Therefore, according to Skinner, learning a language operates on the same principles that a rat will use to learn a maze or to learn to press a button.
Chomsky's Criticism of the Behaviorist Approach
In 1959, Chomsky wrote an article in the journal Language that argued against Skinner's book. A child learns language too quickly for the process to be wholly dependent on such straight-forward learning. Surely language is too complex to be learned one sentence at a time. Where the behaviorists asserted that language learning arises through imitation, children utter sentences that they never would have heard before. For example, a child could say "I don't want to take a bath!" without ever having heard someone else say that sentence.
Chomsky's 1987 essay, "Language in a psychological setting" draws a useful metaphor to separate his linguistic theory from the behaviorists'. He compares the behaviorist approach to filling a bottle with water while his view of language acquisition is more like "helping a flower to grow in its own way."
The Importance of Grammar
Grammar, the collection of rules that govern sentence construction, is what allows people to create novel sentences without having heard them before. Using these rules, people can generate and endless number of sentences that make sense. People also use these rules to identify sentences that are ungrammatical.
A popular example of a perfectly grammatical sentence used by Chomsky is "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." The sentence makes grammatical sense even though it is virtually meaningless, but arrange the words differently and people easily reject the sentence on the grounds of grammar. "Sleep ideas green colorless furiously."
Children Use Grammar to Learn Language During a Critical Period
Because all languages share common grammatical building blocks (e.g. noun and verbs), Chomsky developed the notion of "linguistic universals." He believed that the human brain is structured in such a way as to understand these common grammars automatically. In the early years of a human life, the brain flips these grammar switches that allow the rapid acquisition of language.
The catch is that the human brain only keeps these grammar switches flipped for a few years. This span of time when the switches are on is known as the "critical period," and if a child is not exposed to language during this time, he or she will never be able to develop language normally.
The other implication of the critical period is in second-language learning. Because young children are the most biologically adept at learning language, this is the best time in life to learn a second language. At this age, children will easily pick up a number of languages presented at the same time. For adults, because the grammar switches have turned off, it is much more difficult to learn a new language.
References
Goodwin, C. J. A history of modern psychology. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1999.
Myers, D. Psychology (Sixth Edition). New York, NY: Worth Publishers. 2001.
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