Cykl artykułów został przygotowany przez Lang LTC - platynowe centrum egzaminacyjne Cambridge English, organizatora językowych wyjazdów zagranicznych oraz szkoleń językowych dla firm i klientów indywidualnych.

On language acquisition

O przyswajaniu języka

If some crazy linguist, driven by some sick desire to discover the mechanisms of language acquisition, took a healthy newborn baby, physiologically able to hear and speak and isolated it from all human contact, what language would the baby speak? Would it be the original language spoken by Adam and Eve before the Tower of Babel messed it all up? Would it be gibberish, incomprehensible to anyone? Or maybe the child would not be able to speak at all. Fortunately, experiments like that are not conducted and even thinking of them seems horrific, as nobody would sacrifice the wellbeing of a baby on the altar of neurolinguistics. Nevertheless, without enough evidence we are not able to answer these questions. What we know is that babies are ‘citizens of the world’ in terms of language acquisition because they are able to learn perfectly any language they are exposed to no matter where or of what parents they were born. We find it hard however, to determine what exactly happens when a child is not exposed to any language at all. At various times in history, when the term ‘human rights’ had not yet been coined, experiments were carried out where children were isolated from society in order to find out the root language of man.