Perhaps one of the most important things to human is the language. Think about the world without the language. You won’t be able to do many things. You can’t read, write, speak, and so on. And because it is very crucial part in human life, many people have researched about it for many years. Among these researches, the most interesting and important and mysterious thing is how human have the language. There has been many argues about it. ‘The language Learning’ and ‘The language Acquisition’ are very famous hypothesizes about it.
‘The language Learning’ is that a human can have the language by learning. In contrast, ‘The language Acquisition’ is that the human acquire the language by their innate abilities. Nowadays, the second one is thought to be more reasonable. It says that human has the language acquisition ability which is genetically handed down and acquires the languages by the ability. Noam Chomsky started this hypothesis with the language acquisition device. It is the system of the human brain that is the base of the language acquisition. There are many supports to this hypothesis. One of those supports is animal research. If human got the language by learning, animals could get the language by learning. However, almost researches show that animals can’t learn the languages, except very few animals. Our text book ‘Harvard Sampler’ also supports this hypothesis. It says ‘humans have an innate ability to acquire spoken the language in childhood without needing formal lessons, since complex the language has been documented in every human society, including all hunter-gatherer societies.’
Because of this theory, I think parents should make their babies listen many the languages since they are young. Humans acquire the languages by their innate abilities, so parents should make their children be exposed to various the languages to make them learn the languages more easily. I have three supports to my opinion.
First it is the story of Genie (Curtiss, 1971). She was not exposed to the language, living closed life by her parents. After she was discovered (when she was 13), she was educated by the language learning system, but she could only recite some words, like ‘I like hear music ice cream truck (Curtiss, 1981, p. 21). In ‘language acquire’, there is a critical period as support to the theory. It is a specific time which is prepared to develop certain abilities or skills and it is determined by biology. There is a critical period in human the language development. If children missed the critical period when they were sensitive to the language, they could not acquire the language very well. In the Genie’s story, we can identify the critical period. Genie lost the period to learn language, so she couldn’t learn language very well although she got very organized education system.
Second support is a research that shows that the relationship between USA migration age and English skill becomes different, having special age as a base point (Johnson & Newport, 1). People who migrated 16 years old have a deep relationship between USA migration age and English skill. The older when they migrated, the lower their English skill is. In contrast, people who migrated before 16 years old have no relationship between them.
Third support is our brain. In brain, there is a special area which is related to the language. This is approved by various brain shooting skills, such as MRI, PET, and so on. Several areas of the cerebral cortex are involved in understanding of the language and calculation. First, especially Broca's area and Wernicke's area in the left hemisphere, which is closely related the languages, are critical areas that are responsible for calculating and understanding of the languages. Broca's area is in the frontal left hemisphere and a function for calculating the end adjacent the parietal responsible for exercise capacity. Therefore, when Broca's area is damaged, there is no problem to understand the meaning of a word or a sentence, so losing the ability to structure the words stutter by word and does not fluently (Goodglass & Geschwind, 1976).
My opinion might be ambiguous and irrational according to ‘Nativist Theory.’ Also, some people might say that parents don't have to make efforts to learn the language, because humans the language naturally. However, there are many evidences that the language exposure is very important to the language acquisition. In USA, researchers have two months babies listen US sentence and French sentence in an opposite direction. Then they calculate the time which those babies look direction where one sentence is told. As a result, babies look direction in which US sentence is told. It is because those babies are more exposed to US English, so they are skilled to it. Another evidence is a research which shows that US babies distinguish ‘r’ and ‘l’ better than Japanese babies do. The reason is same with the first evidence. As you see, the exposure of the language is important to acquire the language. Although humans have the innate ability to acquire the language, but humans can’t get the language if they weren’t exposed to the language. The story of Genie can support it.
The language is very imperative, interesting and mysterious part of human. There is no organism which speaks various and certain the languages, except human. It is because human has innate ability to acquire the languages. It is a theory named ‘Nativist theory.’ This theory is supported by three things-animals, the critical period, and brain. Because of this theory, I think parents should make their babies listen many the languages since they are young. Of course, some people might say that parents don't have to make efforts to learn the language, because of ‘Nativist theory’, but the language exposure is one of the important parts in the language acquisition. In conclusion, parents should make efforts to make their babies learn the language more easily.
