Page "Language acquisition" Paragraph 3

A major question in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infants from the linguistic input.

Input in the linguistic context is defined as " All words, contexts, and other forms of language to which a learner is exposed, relative to acquired proficiency in first or second languages " Nativists find it difficult to believe, considering the hugely complex nature of human languages, and the relatively limited cognitive abilities of an infant, that infants are able to acquire most aspects of language without being explicitly taught.

Children, within a few years of birth, understand the grammatical rules of their native language without being explicitly taught, as one learns grammar in school.

A range of theories of language acquisition have been proposed in order to explain this apparent problem.

These theories, championed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and others, include innatism and Psychological nativism, in which a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities, as opposed to other theories in which language is simply learned as other cognitive skills, including such mundane motor skills as learning to ride a bike.

The conflict between the theories assuming humans are born with syntactic knowledge and those that claim all such knowledge is the product of learning from one's environment is often referred to as the " Nature vs. Nurture " debate.

Some think that there are some qualities of language acquisition that the human brain is automatically wired for ( a " nature " component ) and some that are shaped by the particular language environment in which a person is raised ( a " nurture " component ).

Others, especially evolutionary biologists, strongly object to assuming syntactic knowledge is genetically encoded and provided by automatic wiring of the brain.