Language Acquisition: Nature vs.

Nurture It is an incontrovertible fact that there comes a point in the development of all normal children when they are finally capable of uttering their first meaningful words. Not only does this moment amount to one of the most magical experiences in parents lives, but also to one of the most crucial events in infants ontogeny. Despite the consensus on the stages children move through so as to acquire their mother tongue, the origin of this process remains largely a mystery. This gap in our knowledge about language acquisition has given rise to a series of theories that have tackled the issue from different perspectives. One of these theories is innatism. Proposed by American linguist Noam Chomsky, it claims that children are biologically programmed for language and that language develops in the child in just the same way that other biological functions develop (Lightbown & Spada, 2006, p. 15). In other words, all children are exposed to their mother tongue since birth, and at a given point in time, when they are developmentally ready, they start speaking unless there is some sort of disability that prevents them from doing so. According to Chomsky, children are equipped with a Universal Grammar (UG), which is a set of principles that are common to all languages and that allow infants to recognize the structure of their mother tongue and learn its specific rules. This biological endowment for acquiring language seems to be unique to the human species, since no animal group, not even primates, are able to develop such a sophisticated system of communication. The question is: what makes the human mind different from the animal mind? Precisely that is the starting point of Hausers (2009) article Origin of the mind. In the text, the American evolutionary biologist claims that the human mind is substantially different to the animal mind, in spite of them sharing certain characteristics and of the fact that "researchers

have found some of the building blocks of human cognition in other species" (Hauser, 2009, p. 46). The main issue is that although the archaeological evidence has allowed us to pinpoint the historical period in which the human mind started to develop the features that define it today, this data has failed to indicate us why and how our mind evolved into what it is now. For this reason, Hauser (2009) proposes that we should determine "which capacities we share with other animals and which are ours alone" (p. 47) in order for us to know on what to focus our attention. According to Hauser (2009), the four traits that make up our humaniqueness are generative computation, which is the ability to create a virtually limitless variety of expressions by repeatedly using a rule (recursion) or by combining individual elements (p. 46); the promiscuous combination of ideas, which is the association of ideas from different domains of knowledge that results in the creation of new social-cultural products (p. 46); the ability to use mental symbols, which is the capacity to convert any sensory experience real or imagined into a symbol (p. 46); finally, the ability to engage in abstract thought, which is the capacity to think about issues that go beyond our sensual experiences (p. 46). In this sense, it is possible to connect Hausers idea of humaniqueness with Chomskys idea of Universal Grammar, since both concepts relate to the notion that human beings are born with certain faculties that enable them to acquire complex systems of communication. Moreover, Hauser's theory coincides with Chomsky's in that both are founded on the belief that these innate capacities allow humans to acquire and develop a language in spite of the external influences and environmental circumstances: on the one hand, we can infer from Hauser's proposal that all human beings instinctively know how to use the four components of humaniqueness in order to acquire a determined system of communication; on the other hand, from Chomsky's perspective, "children are born with a special ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language

system" (Lightbown & Spada, 2006, p. 16), and therefore the role that the environment plays in the process is rather secondary. One of the major shortcomings of the innatist position is precisely the marginal importance that it attaches to the influence of the socio-cultural context on the language acquisition process. One theory that tackles this issue is the usage-based approach. From the perspective of this approach, human beings are indeed biologically prepared for acquiring a language, though this biological readiness needs to be combined with a meaningful interaction with other proficient users of the language. It is only thus that children are able to acquire the various components of language, namely form (syntax, morphology, and phonology), content (semantics), and use (pragmatics) (Owens, Jr., 2008, p. 17). The key role that interaction and experience play in the acquisition of a language is what Tomasello (2008) explores in Chapter 4 of his book Origins of human communication. In this chapter, called Ontogenetic Origins, the American developmental psychologist discusses prelinguistic gestural communication and expounds the reasons why it constitutes a fundamental step towards the acquisition of language. Tomasello (2008) argues that infants communicative use of gestures is a complex type of behavior because it reflects an understanding, albeit a somewhat basic one, of the components of cooperative communication and of how this type of communication works. For this reason, Tomasello (2008) explains that children do not begin to use gestures communicatively and cooperatively until "their skills of shared intentionality emerge at around the first birthday" (p. 144), that is to say until children are "able to create shared conceptual spaces, or common ground, with other persons" (p. 140). In this sense, the author's claims are closely related to what the usage-based approach proposes in that both emphasize the major part that interaction plays in the acquisition and development of a language.

Without the experience provided by the meaningful interactions with other speakers of the language to be acquired, infants would not be able to develop the social-cognitive and socialmotivational skills they need in order to learn to speak. As we can see, the process of language acquisition has given rise to various theoretical positions. While some experts believe that human beings are endowed with the inborn capacity to acquire language and that the influence of the environment is rather subtle, some others think that this innate ability is not enough by itself because a language cannot be acquired and developed without the participation in collaborative activities. Though these two perspectives may seem irreconcilable, the truth is that both are based on the assumption that there is a series of characteristics that set the human intellect apart from that of animals. How we can account for the existence of these characteristics is a mystery that has yet to be resolved.

References Hauser, M. (2009). Origin of the mind. Scientific American, 44-51. Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. (2006). Learning a first language. How languages are learned (pp. 1-29) (2nd ed.). Oxford, U.K.: OUP Owens, R. (2008). The territory. Language development: An introduction (pp. 2-27). Boston, MA: Pearson. Tomasello, M. (2008). Ontogenetic origins. Origins of human communication (pp. 109-167). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.