All humans learn to speak, including those who were born deaf, unless they experienced a major deficit or trauma. Based on this fact, researchers believe that we have innate, genetically-based structures in the brain that enable us to learn language. However, there are numerous theories of language acquisition.
Sociocultural Theories
Sociocultural theorists suggest that environmental influences such as culture, socioeconomic status, birth order, school, peers, and parents shape language development. Children learn language by hearing other people speak and interpreting it within context.
Conditioning and Learning Theory
B. F. Skinner, on the other hand, proposed the conditioning and learning theory. He proposed that language uses shaping, successive approximations, and reinforcement to learn speech. Skinner argued the word-like utterances of babies are strongly reinforced by the parents. In other words, children speak because they have been reinforced for doing so. This theory asserts that children learn language through imitation, rather than having an innate ability to learn language (see Chomsky's view below).
Nativist Theory
According to the Nativist view, we discover language rather than learn it. Language development is inborn. The brain is wired for language acquisition as evidenced by Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the brain which are dedicated to speech production and comprehension. Noam Chomsky is a pioneering linguist who argued that humans are born with a language acquisition device, an innate, biologically-based capacity to acquire language. The age at which children begin to form grammatically correct sentences is relatively the same throughout the world. Chomsky contended that parents only reinforce content, not grammar. Based on this assertion, he argued that behaviorists such as Skinner could not explain why children formulate grammatically correct sentences.
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