Language Acquisition Is Innate
Human brains have structures that help learn and retain the first language in childhood
As a result of evolution, human brains have developed nuanced language acquisition systems. There are innate facilities in the brain that expedite the learning of language in conjunction with external information. This innateness to learn well the first language is active only during childhood.
There is a developmental psychological period ending at puberty during which one must acquire language. Feral children who lived in isolation their entire childhood and never learned to speak a language weren’t able to speak one at all even when they were taught the language in adolescence and adulthood.
A lack of learned first language restricts mental images and the inability to interact well with society. This phenomenon isn’t true for second languages. 5% of bilinguals master their second language well into adulthood.
It’s been suggested that humans are born with Language Acquisition Devices, genetically encoded cognitive facilities in the brain to learn a language. Constructing meaningful sentences requires one to be able to pick a meaningful arrangement of words from infinite permutations. If children didn’t have these biological systems they wouldn’t be able to learn the language so quickly. This theory by Chomsky hasn’t been neuroscientifically proven yet.
Though a child may not be exposed to certain structures of grammar, it is able to pick up the structures despite no exposure to them. This indicates innateness to synthesize grammatic rules based on labels ascribed to impressions and their relations. Children have innate grammatical concepts that allow them to explore and understand grammar they aren’t exposed to.
Language is the result of facilities of the mind indicating a set of universal grammar principles existing in all known languages. An important feature common among all languages is a distinction between nouns and verbs — objects and processes. However, the mental subsystems and their exact effects on grammar can’t be conclusively articulated.
This gives a nod to the theory that all languages evolved from one. The earliest humans faced the same constraints and experiences, leading to a desire to communicate, which further led to the earliest language rules. This then affected the succeeding children languages.
Language developed as an evolutionary function to coordinate in groups and transact thoughts. Over the course of evolution, the ability to articulate thoughts became more precise, and thinking became increasingly, intrinsically linked with language.