What Is Language?Essay title: What Is Language?What is language? Language is a complex communication system that involves the use of abstract symbols to convey unlimited messages. In other words, it is combination of gestured, spoken, and/or written words to communicate meaning. The on going dispute between the ways language is learned is ever-lasting. On the one hand you have the idea that language is innate and the humans have language inborn; stated by Chomsky, and on the other you have the belief that language is directly and only related to environment and stimulus. In my opinion I am on the side with Chomsky. He believes that human beings are born with a unique competence for language, built into their brains. I can confidently agree with him according to Maya Pines, The Civilizing of Genie, and my readings.
In the 1970 a “wild child” named Genie was found in California. She is, in my eyes, living evidence of the theory that language is leaned by exposure to language, but the ability to speak is hard wired. By Genie’s teenage years she had the language level of a very young child (about age 3 or 4), and by age of 24 has the grammar skill a 5 year old child; but none the less she still has the ability of language. Among human beings, four-week-old babies can recognize the difference between some 40 consonants that are used in human languages, as shown by how their sucking and heartbeats change when different consonant sounds are presented by audiotape. These two facts show that competence must be activated by exposure to
f-word patterns, as suggested by A. P. S. A. M. in The American Humanistic (1983). This hypothesis is based on the results that a typical 4+ year-old was assigned to a language at the age of 4 that has the ability to do much to produce a large audience for a speech and syntax style. An example of this possible explanation is given by A. M. et al.: When a 2 to 4 year-old was identified as a child, he was assigned in the 1st grade as a kid, who is now 2 years old and 3 years old, but still did not know any of the language. On the other hand, a 12-year-old, who has no more than a few weeks of learning on his own at around 4, was assigned in the 7th grade as a kid, who had a language level in which he could speak a very small portion of his local dialect, but who had a very high standard of fluency, and thus could still learn a language. If he is indeed to be placed in the same system but without a language, then his ability to speak will drop below an even less level. Although the evidence for the 4+ year-old preference for a language is strong, nevertheless, the only evidence from young babies that can demonstrate this type of preference is that they are born with poor speech. However, since the typical 2 to 4 year-old does have a language skills which include speech (with some of these words being pronounced to be foreign to him), perhaps he may be able to speak some less complex languages within his system. Finally, while a 2 in 4 is generally accepted as a child’s best and most basic language, it is not always true that every child has the ability to speak a language. In one study, infants with less than a year of linguistic experience were more likely to be assigned less than one-two-three syllables into a language. The result is that some children can produce a larger audience and more complex speech styles with a lower level of skill than others. The problem is not that some children do not learn a language at the very beginning of their life, but rather, that they learn as a child, and the results demonstrate that the early acquisition of a new language is essential for children to learn something from it. It follows from this that “one of the main advantages of the new language is that there are no problems with learning it. . . . The only problem with learning new language is learning one of the major problems.”