Cameron Morin, Docteur en linguistique, ENS de Lyon
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Language acquisition in children is one of the most fascinating features of the human species, as well as one of the most difficult problems in linguistics and cognitive science. What are the processes that enable a child to completely master its native language in just a few years, and to a degree of competence that adult learners of a second language can almost never match?
Far from being a matter of consensus, this subject has in fact greatly divided the research communities in these fields: the 20th century was marked by Noam Chomsky’s influential idea that native-language acquisition might stem from a universal and innate grammatical faculty in humans, distinguishing them from other animal species.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.