Innate Capacity and Linguistic Input in Children’s Language Acquisition

Sigit Suharjono

How children acquire their language has been researcher’s interest of study for
decades, yet (first) language acquisition remains an interesting object of study and leaves a
mystery upto the present. Researchers notice that young children learn their mother tongue
rapidly and effortlessly, from babbling at 6 months of age to full sentences by the age of 3
years, and follow the same developmental path regardless of culture. What is most
remarkable is that children develop the complex system of language in a span of two to five
years (Jackendoff, 1994, p.103). For instance, three year old children can build and
understand complex sentences and master the sound system of their native language without
any direct instruction (O‘Grady, 2008, p. vi). In just a few years, children learn the basic
components of their native language, in which they learn the phonology, morphology,
semantics and syntax of their native language. This phenomenon has led to many researhes
that explained what played in first language acquisition and described how first language
acquisition occurred. Moreover, many of recent studies suggest that our learning of language
results from a specific innate capacity and linguistic input. According to Jackendoff (1994,
p.62), when learning a language, the child selects certain speech sounds from the ones
available in the universal grammar to match those in the environment. Although researchers
are still debating on how much of first language acquisition is nature or innate and how much
is nurture or imitation, they agree to the premise that children can acquire their first language
in the presence of innate capacity and linguistic input.
The proposition that children are born with innate capacity for language acquisition
was introduced by Chomsky (1959) in his review of Skinner’s (1957) verbal behavior.
Chomsky argued that children could not learn all they needed to learn about language without
having an innate ability to acquire language. He further argued that once children are born
and are involved in linguistic environments, they immediately start to develop a language.
However, to do that, children must make use of the only tool they have, that is their inborn
mental grammar. He characterizes this mental grammar as Universal Grammar, which he
argues to be available to newborns before their linguistic experience begins.
The assumption that children language acquisition occurred in the presence of innate
capacity was based on several facts: (1) most children acquire a first language rapidly and
without formal instruction, (2) they do this with only a limited amount of evidence, and (3)
they do it with only limited feedback (Essential Linguistics, n.d., p.15). These three facts
countered the prevailing behaviorist premise that all learning, including language learning,
happened as a process of stimulus and response. The hypothesized innateness is argued in
ways opposing the behaviorist theory.
First, if learning is the result of the environment acting on the child, and if learning-
environments vary, how can one account for the uniformity of the language development
sequence in children? Children raised in very different circumstances all seem to learn to
speak at about the same time, and they all go through the same stages (Lindfors, 1987).
Behaviorist theory would predict different developmental paths for children brought up in
different circumstances, but this is simply not what happens. Studies of child language
acquisition show that children develop the rules of language quickly, they acquire the
language despite receiving only a limited amount of input, and they do it without much
correction. All this suggests that, children must have a built,in capacity for language.
Secondly, if learning is the result of stimulus and response, then why could children
produce more utterances than they hear, and why wouldn’t other intelligent beings, like apes,
also learn to speak? A great deal of study continues to be carried out with apes, dolphins, and
other animals, and while some animals seem to be able to develop certain language functions,
there is a qualitative difference between human language and the communication systems
found among animals. The scientists’ inability to teach animals to speak (using a behaviorist
approach) puts claims for behaviorist learning theory under question, and thus suggest the
claim of Innateness Hypothesis that children’s ability to learn language is due to a genetically
programmed organ that is located in the brain (Chomsky 2004, p.17) .
Last, close examination of children’s language development shows that children don’t
simply imitate adults. If they did, they would never produce sentences like “I goed home
yesterday” because they would never hear sentences like that. At the same time, careful
observation reports that adults seldom correct children’s grammar. Instead, they respond to
the truth value of what the child says, to the message, not the form of the message. So if a
child says something like “I goed home yesterday,” a parent might respond, “Yes, and then
you watched TV.” Transcripts of child-adult interactions show that corrections are not
common. And even when parents do correct the form of the child’s speech (“You mean you
went home yesterday”) it does little good, as most parents can attest. A good example of such
case is also provided to us by the psychologist Martin Braine (as cited in Pinker 1994, p.
281); after spending some time trying to correct his daughter’s grammatical errors, the
following happened.
Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy.
Father: You mean, you want the other spoon.
Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please, Daddy.
Father: Can you say the other spoon?
Child: Other….one…spoon
Father: Say….other
Child: Other
Father: Spoon
Child: Spoon
Father: Other…Spoon
Child: Other….Spoon. Now give me other one spoon?

The phenomenon as illustrated above occurs because children are building underlying
rules as they figure out how language works. They are not simply repeating what they hear.
The child that says “goed” or “other one spoon” is starting to develop a rule for how English
speakers indicate past tense in the first case or how they make up a noun phrase with other
(the second case).
The idea that humans have an innate capacity for language is supported by the fact
that all human languages are reflections of some properties of the human mind, and the best
evidence that humans are born with an innate knowledge of things like nouns and verbs is
that all human languages have something like nouns and verbs. Thus, language must reflect
certain properties of the human mind (Essential Linguistics, n.d., p.18).
Not all of language is, however, innate. The role of language/linguistic input is
believed to be in collaboration with innate capacity, neither of which work out without the
other. According to Ellis (2008), language input is needed as a trigger that activates the
internal mechanism because the learners’ brains are equipped to learn any language with
innate knowledge. Behaviorists also view that language acquisition is controlled by external
factors among which language input which consists of stimuli and feedback is central, but
they ignore the internal processing of the mind for language acquisition (Ellis, 2008). Input is
important not only in first language acquisition but also in second language acquisition. Ellis
(2008) explained the view of interactonists theories which view language acquisition as the
outcome of an interaction at the discourse level between the learners’ mental abilities and the
linguistic environment and input as the role of affecting or being affected by the nature of
internal mechanisms.
The importance of language input is also revealed in the input-interaction model, the
input hypothesis, the universal grammar model, and the information processing model which
treat the role of language input in different ways. According to Gass (1997), in the input-
interaction model, the language input that language learners receive is strengthened by the
manipulation of the input through interaction. Within Krashen’s (1981) comprehensible
input hypothesis, which orientate at second language acquisition, language acquisition takes
place merely by means of comprehensible input which the language learners receive. That is,
only the language input which is a little beyond the learners’ language competence is useful
for language acquisition. In the universal grammar model as explained by Gass (1997)
language input is important but there must be something in addition to language input, that is
innate capacity that helps children acquire language. In the last model, the information
processing model, language input is considered necessary for providing information for
language construction (Gass, 1997).
The role of linguistic input as a trigger that activates the internal mechanism in
language acquisition, as postulated by Ellis (2008), is by history true in that there have been
occasional cases in history where abandoned children who survived in forests, for example,
where no contact with human was available always show the same fact. The children, when
found, are mute. This clearly shows that linguistic input is needed to activate the innate
capacity in the brain, and that language acquisition will not occur without linguistic input.
To conclude, language acquisition can occur in the presence of innate capacity in the
human brain and linguistic input, the second of which functions as a trigger that activates the
first which then functions as the machine that processes the first—linguistic input. The
existence of the biologically programmed organ called innate capacity is mainly drawn from
three facts that (1) most children acquire a first language rapidly and without formal
instruction, (2) they do this with only a limited amount of evidence, and (3) they do it with
only limited feedback while the role of linguistic input as a trigger that activates the innate
capacity can be clearly referred to the occasional cases in history where abondoned children
who have no contact with human such as those who survive in the forests are always found
unable to communicate verbally using any of human language. This really proves that
linguistic input does function as a trigger that makes the innate capacity work.
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