The acquisition of language starts during prenatal life in connection with hearing. The foetus perceives the rhythm and the prosody of their language. From 2 months old, babies can make their first vocalizations; at 5 months they have more control over their vocalizations and they can imitate adults’ intonations. At 8 months they are able to understand some words in specific environments like, for example, when their parents talk to them about their bottle. Then, at 12 months old, babies begin specializing into their native language.
This article will discuss Patricia Kuhl studies, a researcher who works on the acquisition of language during infant development. She defined three processes used during this development period to explain how babies and children from different cultures, as opposed to adults, can detect sounds in any language from around the world.
The first period is called critical period, which is when the nervous system of babies is particularly sensitive to certain stimuli. The author found that babies between 8 and 10 months are able to discriminate sounds of every language in the world. Then, between 10 and 12 months old, they specialize in their native language (graphic on the effect of age discrimination of English between American and Japanese infants in Kuhl article, 2006).
This experiment shows that American and Japanese infants at 6-8 months discriminate the American English, but at 10-12 months, Japanese infant’s discrimination of English declined.
The second process concerns motherese which is a specific and universal language used by the parents to communicate with their babies. This language is used by exaggeration and high tones allowing to babies to discriminate phonemes easier. Thanks to her experiment, we discovered that babies exposed to motherese between 11 and 14 months, and mostly during face to face social interaction, have a better language development at 2 years old and after.
Finally, the third process is statistical learning which corresponds to the infants implicit form of learning. They detect statistical regularities in speech before understanding the meaning of words. Thanks to that, they learned and selected more words and sounds of native language. Studies indicate that this process begin at 6 months of age and continue all of the development of the childhood and adolescence (Kuhl et al. 1992).
To conclude, the acquisition of language is based on different processes: the critical period, motherese, and statistical learning. They are unconscious processes which are also important for the development of learning. These are specific processes of human language acquisition, apart from statistical learning which is not limited to humans (or to language).
Because we know that babies and infants can discriminate and recognize sounds, phonemes and vocalizations of every languages until a specific period, It could be a good idea to deepen the learning of foreign languages in the education of children. If we observe the second graph, we see that children under 7 years old are good to acquire a new language but it’s declines after this age and for the rest of their life (graphic of critical period to acquire a second language in Jonshon and Newport article, 1989).
In the age of globalisation, teachers can propose foreign lessons from elementary/junior schools to develop children abilities and skills.