6 Summary of Session 8

Children integrate a range of statistical, cognitive, social and cultural skills in the process of language acquisition. They imitate the language they experience as part of a broader motivation to adopt the cultural norms of their community. As their knowledge and skills accumulate, they become inventive with the patterns of use they have acquired, balancing a need to conform but also to be creative. Underpinning this is an assumption that speakers share cooperative communication intentions.

Children are not passive recipients of linguistic content but active participants in constructing language with the people around them. The language children use influences the language peers and adults use with them, in a constantly developing network of cause and effect. Newly acquired cognitive and social capabilities lay the foundations for language to happen, but language ratchets more nuanced and complex thoughts in an ongoing escalation throughout development. Children learn how to control language not just to share who-did-what-to-whom, but to benefit from its power to collaborate and compete with others.

Despite its complexity, learning a language is fundamentally about learning a skill. As such, we would expect it to look like the development of other skills, and it does, showing periods of incremental growth, assembling smaller first-acquired sub-skills into larger more complex units, going through a period of over-generalisation and errors, before refinement, a slower rate of change, and ultimately automatisation of processes that were once effortful. ‘Imitate, assimilate, innovate’ is a quote attributed to trumpeter Clark Terry, to summarise the acquisition of jazz improvisation skills. It is also not a bad basic summary of language acquisition.