Page "Language acquisition" Paragraph 4

Philosophers in ancient societies were interested in how humans acquired the ability to understand and produce language well before empirical methods for testing those theories were developed, but for the most part they seemed to regard language acquisition as a subset of man's ability to acquire knowledge and learn concepts.

Some early, observation based ideas about language acquisition were proposed by Plato, who felt that word-meaning mapping in some form was innate.

Additionally, Sanskrit grammarians debated for over twelve centuries whether humans ' ability to recognize the meaning of words was god-given ( possibly innate ) or passed down by previous generations and learned from already established conventions — e. g. a child learning the word for cow by listening to trusted speakers talking about cows.