THEORIES OF FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
First language acquisition is a robust process. Despite differences among cultures in the kind of early language experience provided to children, all normal children in anything remotely approximating a normal environment learn to talk (Hoff, 2006a). The rapidity and robustness of first language acquisition, along with its status as an accomplishment unique to humans, suggests to some that first language acquisition is supported by language specific innate knowledge. Language, according to this view, is encoded in the human genome—as are stereoscopic vision and bipedal locomotion. Another argument for the position that language has significant innate support comes from analyses of the nature of language knowledge in both the adult and child. Once language is acquired, speakers and hearers have the capacity to produce and understand an infinite number of novel sentences. This productivity of language poses a challenge to efforts to account for language acquisition on the basis of experience. Somehow children go beyond what they have experienced and construct a grammar that allows them to produce an infinite number of different sentences from a finite inventory of words. The argument for innate linguistic knowledge is also supported by evidence that very young children are sensitive to structural properties of language for which there is no obvious explanation in terms of infants' experience (Lidz, 2007).
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