The human capacity for language and thought

Humans possess the capacity for language and the ability to use it in endlessly creative ways. Individuals are born with a predisposition to learn language and from the earliest of days, we have named and described things to others to let them know what is happening around us.

The acquisition of language and universal grammar happens during a child’s early age and human beings are pre-wired to learn language. We are born with the basic rules for language intact. The basic properties of language, the most rudimentary and elementary properties of language, which emerge quite early have already been developed very extensively in a four-year old.

The human brain is ready to quickly acquire language at specific stages in the developmental process. Cognition plays an important role in the acquisition and development of language and linguistic factors influence general cognitive development.

Language can be described as an aspect of cognition and its development as an aspect of the development of cognition. There are a number of cognitive systems which seem to have distinct and specific properties and they provide a basis for certain cognitive capacities — for simplicity of exposition.

The term “language” is used in quite different ways. The term language is used to refer to human languages, that is, a specific biological characteristic of humans. There is a human language faculty which allows us to develop the kind of knowledge that you and I share that makes it possible for us to conduct this conversation.

The human mind comprises an extensive cluster of innate ‘modules’, one of which is language. Each module operates automatically, independently of individual control, on the basis of a distinct, domain-specific set of rules that take determinate inputs from some modules and yield determinate outputs for others. The various modules interact in complex ways to yield perception, thought, and a large number of other cognitive products.

Children are born with an innate ability to learn language and grammar. This is a vital skill needed for children to learn a language. The role of imitation alone - especially if the adult is using a structure that the child has not started to use yet – is not significant

Suppose the child’s first word is some name for its mother. With this reference, obviously other cognitive capacities come into play. That is, before a child can refer to some object in its external environment, it has to have isolated and identified objects in its environment. It has to have recognised that there are people, that there are things, and that they have certain properties — constancies and persistence and so on. I also like to believe that language is complex and with an unlimited combination of sounds, words and phrases, the environmental learning is not able to account for language acquisition alone.

Prof Noam Chomsky

(Professor Noam Chomsky is linguist, philosopher and cognitive scientist. This article is adapted from his web talk on ‘The Human Capacity: Language and Thought’ for the Department of Linguistics, Aligarh Muslim University [AMU].)