Language Development

For centuries, philosophers and psychologists have tried to understand how it is that children learn their first language. Are humans simply endowed with language? Are humans carefully taught? To address these questions one must first ask, "What is language?" One way of thinking about the problem is to assume that language is like an orchestra. It is composed of many parts that intricately work together to provide a unified sound. Just as there are sections in the orchestra (the strings, the brass, the wind instruments, and the percussion), there are components of language in sounds, meanings, words, grammar, and rules for how one uses each of these parts in culturally appropriate ways. Language acquisition, then, is really the development of many pieces of a language system that must evolve and work in tandem to perform the "score" of human talk.