I am therefore precisely a thinking thing
                                               Rene DesCartes


The following is excerpted from a paper I did for a course in applied linguistics I am taking at UMB

For the philosopher or the theologist, there might be no compromise on the issue, but when it comes to human behavior, most scientists take a stand in the middle and admit that nature and nurture function together to determine the behaviors we exhibit. No child is born with a propensity to speak German over Chinese but that child will speak one or both of those languages depending on the environment he or she is born into. On the other hand, no one would deny that many traits we have are exclusively genetic. The distinction is less clear when we address language acquisition itself. There are many universals common across all cultures which some attribute to genetics as do Chomsky and other Innatists. Because the scope of language research ranges from the microscopic biochemical level of genes to the macroscopic level of socio-cultural environment, it is necessary to narrow our focus with a discussion of the nature of language itself.

All animals seem to be endowed with specialized anatomy perfectly suited to their role in the environment and to the ecological niche in which they exist; ants have mandibles for biting and carrying food, mosquitos have probosci for extracting blood to feed their eggs, sharks have rows of razor sharp teeth for ripping flesh, the sandpiper on the beach has little legs for running along the water’s edge and sharp eyes to spot tiny crustaceans which it stabs with its specialized beak. Human beings, in many respects similar to the other animals, have two highly specialized traits which are also adapted to highly specialized roles; these are two hands with opposable thumbs and the ability to use language, each connected to a neural array in the cortex without equal in its complexity and adaptability. As marvelously designed as a mosquito’s proboscus is for extracting blood, it remains, in essence, a simple tool. This is not true for language; unlike the mosquito, there is no exchange of fluids involved or extraction of material sustenance. Language use is not even primarily utilitarian but rather its purpose is to construct and to communicate identity. Descartes verified his existence by reference to his thought processes; “Cogito ergo sum”, “ I think therefore I am.” Language is used to exchange the essence of our existence, that which what is in our minds.

In order to discern how biology relates to culture in language acquisition, we need to begin with the basic biology behind this specialized trait. At first glance, we seem to have the same facial anatomy as many other mammals; tongue, teeth, voice box, nasal cavity, nose. Notwithstanding that they might have little to say, with appropriate training, one might expect chimpanzees to form words if only for the banana they would receive. If this were possible, we would be inundated with showmen and their talking animals. However, it is not. No animals can speak in any sense of the way that humans speak either through intelligence of discourse or intricacy of phonetic expression. The anatomy behind language in humans is extraordinarily specialized and complex. Sound is produced by air passing up from the lungs through the vocal cords, the sound is then modified by the action of the tongue, and lips and by the shape and resonance qualities of the oral cavity and the nasal cavity. Hundreds of muscles work in coordination to achieve the multitude of sounds required by speech, and the muscles are controlled by areas in the brain, Broca’s area being the chief area of the cortex associated with speech production. Speech production is only half of the story, however, the other half is comprehension; there has to be a part of the brain that initially processes the linguistic information coming in through the ears before, another part of the brain formulates a response. But, on this level, we are still only talking about mechanical aspects related to making and receiving the sounds that make up language. We still need to answer the question, “what is language?”.

Is language simply a code for the transmission of information through sound waves? “There are three cows in that field” is a simple sentence, but only a human being could be consciously aware of the reality of three cows in a field. A machine could add three more cows, it could translate the sentence into another code, it could store the information, send it around the world to another machine, but could it wonder, “what is a cow?”, could it understand a sentence like:

So much depends upon a red
wheelbarrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens
             
                William Carlos Williams.

 A joke is funny to the teller along with the hearer because they both discern in the words a commonly understood reference to something comic and absurd that goes beyond the information carried by the words themselves. That is where we begin to move into the cultural aspect of language.

Generally when we learn a new language, we are attempting to learn the code consisting of vocabulary and grammatical words, and desire to acquire that code as part of our verbal repertoire, that is to say to be able to fluently express ideas using that code and to understand what is written or spoken in that code. Much of the accompanying cultural information cannot be taught in a classroom and, in fact, may not need to be taught in the classroom. Many Americans take a foreign language in High School or College they are taught by an American teacher who speaks English as his or her first language and they learn surrounded exclusively by other English speaking students, yet most do acquire some ability in the new language. Throughout the world English is recognized as a lingua franca and many people learn English as a second language entirely within their own culture and will commonly speak English outside of any English language culture. To conclude this introduction then, let us define language as a highly complex audible code originating in the neural and physical anatomy of human beings and designed to communicate thoughts and ideas between human beings; the higher level meta-communication associated with language is not here included as part of language itself. We can now take a look at some of the current research in the field of language acquisition.