Quotes & Sayings About First Language Acquisition

some linguists have also concluded that, while the innatist perspective provides a plausible explanation for first language acquisition, something else is required for second language acquisition, since it so often falls short of full success. From the cognitive psychology perspective, however, first and second language acquisition are seen as drawing on the same processes of perception, memory, categorization, and generalization. The difference lies in the circumstances of learning as well as in what the learners already know about language and how that prior knowledge shapes their perception of the new language. — Patsy M. Lightbown

Deaf, signing parents will "babble" to their infants in sign, just as hearing parents do orally; this is how the child learns language, in a dialogic fashion. The infant's brain is especially attuned to learning language in the first three or four years, whether this is an oral language or a signed one. But if a child learns no language at all during the critical period, language acquisition may be extremely difficult later. Thus a deaf child of deaf parents will grow up "speaking" sign, but a deaf child of hearing parents often grows up with no real language at all, unless he is exposed early to a signing community. — Oliver Sacks

Since we nowadays think that all a man needs for acquisition of truth is to exert his brain more or less vigorously, and since we consider an ascetic approach to knowledge hardly sensible, we have lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity. Thomas says that unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of the spirit. Only he who wants nothing for himself, who not subjectively 'interested,' can know the truth. On the other hand, an impure, selfishly corrupted will-to-pleasure destroys both resoluteness of spirit and the ability of the psyche to listen in silent attention to the language of reality. — Josef Pieper

The child's reluctance to speak for the first few months of his residence in a new country is not pathological, but normal. — Stephen D. Krashen