Babies come into the world primed to learn language. They’ll do it whether you want them to or not, without any instruction, in a sequence of stages that are the same for all children the world over, regardless of whether they’re learning Swahili, or English. All they need is a little data – data supplied automatically by their environment, as long as there are people around them who are speaking. Then they embark on a systematic analysis of their native language to be that is so skilled it would put a linguistics graduate student to shame. They are, in effect, like little natural-born linguistic anthropologists, eagerly and instinctively performing phonological, morphological, semantic, and syntactic analyses of the language of the natives in their newfound world so they can figure out the rules of that language and become expert speakers themselves.
Standard psychology textbooks will tell you that the stages of language acquisition go something like this. From about four to six months of age, infants produce brief, isolated consonant and vowel sounds as well as clicks, coos, grunts, and sighs that bear little or no resemblance to speech sounds in any language. At about six months, they begin what’s called the babbling stage, mouthing repetitive consonant-vowel sequences. Around the turn of the first year, the infant moves beyond babbling and begins to produce recognizable words in the language spoken around it.
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