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What evidence is there that the ability to learn a language natively may decline after the first few years of life?
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What evidence is there that the ability to learn a language natively may decline after the first few years of life? Children are very skilful linguists. Evidence defined in Chomsky's Innateness Hypothesis shows that a considerable amount of grammatical properties are innate. In other words, 'humans are predisposed to learn and use a language'. The contents of the innate language faculty is not specific to any language, so for example an English child brought up by Japanese parents would learn to speak Japanese. This therefore suggests a universal grammar, which allows a child to form and interpret sentences in any natural language. Studies have shown that newborns can discriminate between different languages. This is measured by sucking behaviour in infants under three months, and direction of gaze to aural stimulus in infants older than three months. Mehler et al (1988) investigated how infants discriminate between languages at birth. Four-day-old infants whose ambient...
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