# Language Acquisition --- **Language acquisition** is the process by which humans learn how to understand and [[speech|speak]] a language. >[!quote] A constellation of factors >A constellation of factors that are unique to human development—infants' prolonged period of dependency, exquisite sensitivity to experience, and powerful learning strategies—collectively spark a cascade of defelopmental change whose ultimate result is the acquisition of language and its unparalleled interface with cognition. > >—Perszyk & Waxman, 2018 The **language acquisition device** or **LAD** is a theoretical mental structure that our [[brain|brains]] first theorized by Noam Chomsky, that is essentially a scaffolding on which infants can build up a language. He noticed all children are surprisingly regular with learning their native language's grammar, like they're all on the same schedule. The LAD is evident even in deaf children, because we can see that deaf and hearing children alike prefer to look at sign language over nonlinguistic pantomime—although this drops off around 10 month of age, this is also when deaf children start signing (a good two months sooner than hearing children!) **General timeline of language acquisition** (this varies by child) age | means of communication ---|--- newborn | **reflexive** communication (i.e crying, flailing, facial expressions) 2 months | **basic meaningful noises** (i.e. cooing, fussing, crying, laughing) 3-6 months | **more meaningful noises** (i.e. squealing, growling, crooning, trilling and making vowel sounds) 6-10 months | **babbling**, with both vowl and consonant sounds in repeated syllables 10-12 months | deaf babies begin to **sign**, otherwise babies make **wordlike sounds** that only their caregivers understand 12 mohths | first "real" words 13-18 months | vocabulary builds up gradually to about 50 words 18 months | **naming explosion** (three or more words learned in a day) 21 months | first **two-word sentances** 24 months| about half of what they say is two words or longer 2 years | knows 100-2,000 words, can use **plurals** and **pronouns**; asks "what's that?" 3 years | knows 1,000-5,000 words, can use **conjuntctions**, **adverbs** and **articles**; asks "why?" 4 years | knows 3,000-10,000 words, can use **dependent clauses** and **sentace tags**; asks "how?" and "when?"; **overregularization** occurs 6+ years | knows 5,000-30,0000 words, and use **complex grammer**, such as the passive voice and subjunctive; begins to ask complex questions ## Overregularization **Overregularization** is a grammar mistake that children make where they overregularize grammar rules which are irregular. For example, they may say "thooths" instead of teeth, or "goed" instead of "went". This usually happens around age 4, even if they had previously used the correct forms by mimicking what they hear from adults. ___