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Reflection: Acquiring the Human Language

In the video "Acquiring the Human Language," we could appreciate several points of
view about how children acquire language. To begin with, Howard Lasnik, an expert on the topic,
said that mothers definitely do not teach their children to speak. He argued that according to
Chomsky, many of the processes have a mental computation involved in the use of language. For
example, walking can be coated in the DNA because children start to walk by themselves. It is
further claimed that the human species has a common human language. For example, people
living in New Guinea Island and Lawrence speak languages very different from English. But as
Frederick Newmeyer said, today there are no primitive languages all have their own rules. In
summary, there are numerous opinions about the cause of language learning. Based on research
and observations (also shown in this video), children are born with the intelligence to learn to
speak, as well as to learn due to the environment around them.
It was very fascinating to know theories about language acquisition by different
specialists in the subject. Something that impressed me was what Ellen Markman claimed. She
argued that children are not open mind on a word meaning. For instance, they do not seek another
meaning of a word. Instead, they start out expecting object labels to refer to the whole object. For
example, a child can confuse a dog with a cat or another animal because they associate the word
dog in every animal or other things. Also, something I had not thought about before is that we all
have the ability to communicate. I was surprised about how people communicate in New Guinea.
They learn to talk just to hear each other, corroborating children learn from their surroundings.
Also I liked what Suzette Haden Elgin said about the ways of communication. She said that in
every language there are several ways to make things negative, ways to ask a question,
distinguish between one and more than one, etc. I agree with her; I think that in every language
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we express the same emotions. I also agree with Howard Lasnik when he made a comparison
between mothers and birds. He said that as birds do not teach their young to fly, mothers do not
teach children language. I found this an excellent and persuasive example. On the other hand,
something I learned from watching this video was that children are a lot smarter than we think.
They assume things like an adult could do. Moreover, regarding the child who says "yamamas," I
remember that as a child I used to say similar things. For example, I knew that the word dad
was referring actually to my dad, but instead I called him "patato" (pronounced in Spanish)
because it was more comfortable for me to call him in that way. The curious of this, according to
my parents, is that I never heard that word but I invented it. Precisely that topic was discussed in
one of the classes.
Unlike what many people think, there are more logical answers about how children learn
how to speak. From the beginning of the video, some people say that children learn to speak
because their parents teach them or because they imitate their mother or what they hear, etc.
However, the theories of Chomsky appear to be one of the most convincing. Differing from other
perspectives, Noam Chomsky said that the child is already equipped with the basic structure of
any human language. So, we all born capable of learning any language, and that's why we all
learn to speak. Children under 3 years old, as showed in the video, are incapable of do
multiplications or divisions, but they can speak. Basically, they learn to talk by listening to
others, and in less than two years, children are capable of produce an infinite number of
sentences. Nevertheless, these are just a few of the theories that explain language acquisition.