One of the amazing things that children do is learning how to talk. The language acquisition is very complex but children could learn its underlying structure and use it to communicate, all within the first few years of life. How do the children do it? There have been various schools of taught concerning the mechanisms involved in children language acquisition. The early theory is the behaviorism which is a school of psychology. One of the founders is B.F. Skinner. It focused on people‟s behaviors which is observable. Nevertheless, it failed to consider the unobservable mental process involved in learning language. The school of taught proposed that language is a verbal behavior and that children learn language through imitation, reinforcement, analogy and similar processes. They believed that babies were born with a „tabula rasa‟ or a blank slate mind. Children have no power on knowledge and therefore, parents or caregivers are responsible to provide them with knowledge. On the other hand, Noam Chomsky, the innatist approach theorist posited that language is a complex cognitive system. So, it could not be acquired by behaviorist principles. Chomsky proposed that children are born with a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) which encodes the major principles of a language and its grammatical structure into the children‟s brain that gives them an innate ability to learn language. Through LAD, children are able to learn new vocabulary and later on able to form sentences. He argued that children learn language through imitation from the adults. Children do a lot of mistakes, “I eated” instead of “I ate” or” two foots” instead of “two feet” for instant. The adults would never say eated or two foots. The example shows clearly that children do not learning language through imitation alone.
Another proposal in the behaviorist tradition is that children learn to produce correct grammatical sentences because they are positively reinforced by saying a grammatically correct sentence and are negatively reinforced when they say a grammatically incorrect sentence (Bonhannon III et al., 2005; Fromkin et al., 2007; Skinner, 2005). However, in many cases, correction usually occurs for mispronunciations or incorrect reporting facts but not for incorrect grammar. For example, “Her curl my hair” is not corrected because there is a fact that a child‟s mother is curling her hair. In contrast, “Walt Disney comes on Tuesday” is corrected because the programme was actually shown on Wednesday. A further theory suggested that children learn language through analogy: learning by hearing sentences, and using these as a model for their own productions. Thus, analogy does not explain how children learn the intricacies of language. Another theory is through structured input; simplified language that parents use to talk to their children. It is also called „Motherese‟ or „Child-Directed Speech‟. Many studies have shown that the use of the simplified language does not really affect a child‟s linguistic development. It appears that children go through some stages in language development. The first stage is called the prelinguistic, cooing or babbling stage. During their first months, babies normally cry as their responses. While crying, they produce sounds and at the same time they learn to use the sounds. They also make some kinds of noises like “oooo” or “aaaa” which is known as cooing. At the age of five months, they will start babbling and add consonant sounds to their sounds such as “ma-ma” or “ga-ga”. Babies all around the world babbling using the same sounds and some of the sounds are never used in their surrounding or environment. Babies are also born with a superb hearing and listening ability. Their ears are very sensitive to sounds. So, they can hear and produce the sounds of all language in
the world. However, they will listen and able to recognize which sounds belong to the language they are learning and which do not. At the age of one year, they will drop the sounds that are not part of their native language. The second stage is learning word. By the age of 10 to 13 months, children learn that combined sounds can make a meaningful word. They know that the sounds m, ah, m and ee refer to their mother. This stage is also known as the one- word level or holophase stage. It is followed by the two-word sentence level or telegraphic speech stage which usually begins at the age of 18 months. The sentences that are produced contain only nouns and verbs. For example, “Mummy water” and “Daddy car”. Parents play an important role to improve their children‟s speech by adding function words to the content words produced by the children. Bit by bit, the children will learn through imitating, practicing and create responses. Last but not least is the third stage where children around two years old learn to make sentences. By now, they can put words in the correct order to form sentences. As they grow up, they learn more words every day. By the age of 5 when they enter school, they have already ten thousand words or more. Children need a lot of stimulation, input and feedback they need to create from their parents or their caregivers. In order to do that, parents usually make some modification in the language to make their speech more comprehensible for the child such as using short and simple sentences. In conclusion, an instinct to learn language is uniquely human and distinguishes us from other creatures in the planet. Children are born with the instinct to learn language. In fact, they are better learners than the adults in terms of learning language which is very complex. How they do it in just a few years still remains a mystery.
