Universal Adaptability and Language Acquisition

By: Professor Gloriela Jiménez Víquez

How a person develops language is a task that linguists have tried to explain in many different ways.   According to Noam Chomsky, the human brain is equipped with what he calls a Language Acquisition Device or LAD, which is an innate ability that is responsible for helping the child to organize language structures in order to transform the auditory stimulus into understandable spoken patterns that he will later use to communicate with others.

Thus, LAD has been used to explain that children can learn any language intuitively before a certain age.  This is known as Universal Adaptability and states that infants, under one year of age, have the capacity to distinguish sounds and are able to reproduce them, no matter the language.  However, this ability is lost after the child starts to learn the patterns included in his native language.  This happens because the child specializes only on those phonemes the L1 (Native Language) includes, while hinder the opportunity to be exposed to the ones that L1 does not incorporate.

Universal Adaptability then, deals with the capacity that babies have to be able to reproduce native like accents in any language that they are exposed to at early life stages.  Losing this gift, however; does not mean that children, who are exposed to multilingual setting after age one, won’t be able to become fully bilingual.  It will only depend on the kind of exposure, the kind of input, and the importance given to using L2 in meaningful situations, where appropriate feedback is provided when needed.