First Language Acquisition. By H. Douglas Brown.

THE DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO ACQUIRE OUR LANGUAGE

There have been different theories about how do we get our first language since we are born and at the same time, different methods, experiments and studies to prove, analyze, support or reject such theories. Some studies with the most similar animal to humans, the chimpanzee, have demonstrated that “humans are unique” as a rational specie with many special features in our brain to help us acquire completely our language to communicate. Although many specialists tried to teach chimpanzees by including them in daily lives and routines with kids in loving families and a lot of care and patience, they couldn’t reach other goal than separate words (no more than 4 in a logical sequence) using many strategies which included immersion, and treatment as a foreign student, and this only strength our statement (we are unique).

In the text wrote by Brown we can discriminate three different approaches about human language acquisition, he tells us about “behaviorist approaches, natives approaches and functional approaches”, and each one has influence in the language acquisition of every human. For example in one hand we can talk about behavior approach, we can find that humans get the majority of the language from the environment surrounding us while we grow up, and it means that in our relation with other people we learn grammatical structures based in our experience and not in our studies.

On the other hand the term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of language around us.
Chomsky claimed the existence of innate properties of language to explain the child’s mastery of a native language. This innate knowledge is embodied in a language acquisition device (LAD). McNeill described LAD as consisting of four innate linguistic properties.
1. The ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment.
2. The ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can later be refined.
3. Knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds are not.
4. The ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic system so as to construct the simplest possible system out of the available linguistic input.


Finally if we talk about functional approaches we see that Brown says that besides the behavior approaches like environment language acquisition and the nativity system of comprehension is necessary to understand the relation of them with the functions of language, and to understand it we have to see deeper in our mind functions, those are independently organized and include functions like perception and memory, this functions complement a superstructure that rules our linguistic abilities and give us the performance to communicate any idea in that specific language, it means that the learning of any language must be based in the functional cognitive capacities and in the linguistic experiences and not in the complex structures of languages.

I agree with the author in the last approach (Functional Approach) because it includes the idea of an environment influencing in language acquisition and accepts the idea of a native internal system of language comprehension so we can understand that this two approaches are not only necessary, but integrating these theories and the functional approach we can complement the best way of a first language acquisition.