LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Language acquisition is one of the central topics in cognitive science. Every theory of cognition has tried to explain it; probably no other topic has aroused such controversy. Possessing a language is the quintessentially human trait: all normal humans speak, no nonhuman animal does. Language is the main vehicle by which we know about other people's thoughts, and the two must be intimately related. Every time we speak we are revealing something about language, so the facts of language structure are easy to come by; these data hint at a system of extraordinary complexity. 

Language acquisition is not only inherently interesting; studying it is one way to look for concrete answers to questions that permeate cognitive science:

1. Modularity. Do children learn language using a "mental organ," some of whose principles of organization are not shared with other cognitive systems such as perception, motor control, and reasoning (Chomsky, 1975, 1991; Fodor, 1983). 
2. Human Uniqueness. A related question is whether language is unique to humans. At first glance the answer seems obvious. Other animals communication with a fixed repertoire of symbols, or with analogue variation like the mercury in a thermometer. But none appears to have the combinatorial rule system of human language, in which symbols are permuted into an unlimited set of combinations, each with a determinate meaning.
3. Language and Thought. Is language simply grafted on top of cognition as a way of sticking communicable labels onto thoughts (Fodor, 1975; Piaget, 1926)? Or does learning a language somehow mean learning to think in that language.
4. Learning and Innateness. All humans talk but no house pets or house plants do, no matter how pampered, so heredity must be involved in language. But a child growing up in Japan speaks Japanese whereas the same child brought up in California would speak English, so the environment is also crucial. Thus there is no question about whether heredity or environment is involved in language, or even whether one or the other is "more important." Instead, language acquisition might be our best hope of finding out how heredity and environment interact.

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