Basic linguistic topics - Essay Example

his disciple cannot be overemphasized as it will help parents to better understand the language learning capacity of their ward, as well as know how to help their children attain their maximum potential in the early developing stages. Stork and Widdowson (1997) assert that the two contributing factors for child language acquisition are an “innate potential” for acquisition of any language and a “linguistic environment” (Rahimpour 2). In addition to these two factors there are several other elements, which come into play and that work throughout the different developmental stages of a child’s language acquisition process.

In order to understand this process properly one must understand each individual milestone, which works together and ultimately enables the child to communicate to his or her environment with a language. The aim of this paper is to recognize and analyse the major milestones in child language acquisition. However, before getting into the stages of child language acquisition it is important to understand theories that describe the ability as well as linguistic capability of children. In the words of Noam Chomsky, “nobody is taught language,” which implies that parents do not hold the credit for their children learning a particular language, and furthermore, they “cannot prevent the child from learning it” either (Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams 394).

However, researchers have remained perplexed as to how children form questions, negate sentences, use “pronouns appropriately” as well as understand countless sentences they have “never heard” even before they are able to “add small numbers or tie their shoes” (394). But, in depth study and analysis in this same matter has led the researchers to come up with many different theories that relate to language acquisition. The major theories include “behaviorism, nativism, social cognition theory and social interactionism,” where each theory is different from the other yet no one