Natural Language - Native Language Learning

Native Language Learning

The learning of one's own native language, typically that of one's parents, normally occurs spontaneously in early human childhood and is biologically, socially and ecologically driven. A crucial role of this process is the ability of humans from an early age to engage in speech repetition and so quickly acquire a spoken vocabulary from the pronunciation of words spoken around them. This together with other aspects of speech involves the neural activity of parts of the human brain such as the Wernicke's and Broca's areas.

There are approximately 7,000 current human languages, and many, if not most seem to share certain properties, leading to the hypothesis of Universal Grammar, as argued by the generative grammar studies of Noam Chomsky and his followers. Recently, it has been demonstrated that a dedicated network in the human brain (crucially involving Broca's area, a portion of the left inferior frontal gyrus), is selectively activated by complex verbal structures (but not simple ones) of those languages that meet the Universal Grammar requirements.

While it is clear that there are innate mechanisms that enable the learning of language and define the range of languages that can be learned, it is not clear that these mechanisms in anyway resemble a human language or universal grammar. The study of language acquisition is the domain of psycholinguistics and Chomsky always declined to engage in questions of how his putative language organ, the Language Acquisition Device or Universal Grammar, might have evolved. During a period (the 1970s and 80s) when nativist Transformational Generative Grammar was becoming dominant in Linguistics, and called "Standard Theory", linguists who questioned these tenets were disenfranchised and Cognitive Linguistics and Computational Psycholinguistics were born and the more general term Emergentism developed for the anti-nativist view that language is emergent from more fundamental cognitive processes that are not specifically linguistic in nature.