What Linguistics Teaches Us About Learning Language

This chapter describes the processes of child language acquisition and the contributions of various linguistic fields to theories describing how children acquire their first language. The stages of first language acquisition, including cooing, babbling, holophrastic, telegraphic, and infinity, are described and exemplified. The chapter also provides explanations of theories describing how native languages are acquired. These include behaviorism, cognitivism, and social interactionism. Linguistic and psychological contributions from, respectively, structural linguistics and psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics and neurolinguistics, and sociolinguistics are explored. Examples of language generated by and to children are included to accompany the definitions and explanations.