First Language Acquisition

When children start pronouncing words, they are demonstrating the

long way they have been walking towards language acquisition. Form
gestures to words, process gets richer. Initial communicative forms
are not abandoned, but combines, recognized and complemented
with new ways of communication. The first babbles are going to be
substituted by new words.
When reached the first year, children start understanding and
repeating a few words. From this moment on, the number of words
they understand and produce start growing quickly, and they begin to
combine them, and start to form sentences. But, how do they acquire
language?
There are different theories abo8ut how language is learned. On
a general view there are two polarized opinions: the first one is the
one called Tabula Rasa. The concept is that children are born with any
knowledge or notion about language, and they learn it slowly, helped
and conditioned by their environment. The other position is that
children are born with an innate knowledge about language, and
biological timetables, and that they learn how to use it through
interaction.
Among these options, we can find many other theories. The
main three ones are: Behaviorism, Innatism and The
Integrationist Position.

Behaviorism is based on imitation and practice. Children

imitate what they hear around them and repeat it until they get to
understand its meaning, and use it in correct form, when they do,
they stop imitating this and start imitating another new word
structures. But children’s imitation of words is kind of selective,
because they repeat words that are released to what they are
learning in that moment; to something they have already started to
understand. H.D. Brown says in “Principle of Language
Teaching and Learning” that “a behaviorist might consider
effective language behavior to be the production of correct responses
to stimuli. If a particular response is reinforced, it then becomes
habitual, or conditions. Thus children produce linguistic responses
that are reinforced”.
So, although this theory does explain, in some way, how
children start learning language, the grammatical structures´
understanding need some other kind of explanation. And in response
to this, appears Chomsky’s theory: Innatism.
In this theory, Chomsky argues that we are born with biological
predisposition towards language, and it is developed as well as other
biological functions, like walking. His theory explains the logical
problem of language acquisition, which is that children know much
more about the grammatical structure than they are expected to,
according to what they hear and can repeat. The child’s surrounding
environment makes a contribution, but this environment has many
difficulties for the child to understand, and has not everything the
child needs to acquire a proper language. So, the innate knowledge
will solve it. This ability is what Chomsky calls “the black box”,
which, he says, is placed somewhere in our brains. And has the basic
knowledge and principles of universal grammar. This “black box” has
to be activated in each language in particular. In addition to this, Eric
Lenneberg explains that “language acquisition device” will
only work properly if activated in the right time, and he calls it
“critical period.”
The debate between these two positions, gives place to a third
theory that focuses on the interaction between child’s innate
knowledge and the linguistic environment. This theory is called “The
Interactionist Position”, and agrees with Innatism in the idea that
language is acquired in the same way as other skills and functions
developed. The interactionist Lev Vygotsky points out that “language
is entirely developed by social interaction”, which means that children
would not be able to improve their knowledge only by themselves.

To sum up, these theories contribute to explain how first

language is acquired. Each one is related to the explanation of the
different parts of language development. Behaviorism goes through
the explanation of grammatical morphemes and vocabulary
acquisition, while Innatism centers its theory in complex grammar.
The interactionist theory helps to understand the relation between
form and learning, the children’s social interaction and the
appropriate use of the language.