Summary of Elizabeth, Vanessa, Dwayne, Nurburak and Roe's Blogs

The five of us were in agreement that a combination of both the nativist and the social interactionists theories are necessary for language acquisition. We believe that you are born with the innate capacity to acquire language. Dwayne used as an example, if a child had a physiological impairment such as frontal lobe damage, more than likely they would be unable to speak. The latter was confirmed through the experiments of Paul Broca a french neurologist. Broca's experiments focused on the areas in the brain that were responsible for speech.

We all believe that your environment also plays a large part through things such as social interaction, modeling your parents, music and television your language develops. Vanessa uses the experience of how her neices and nephews would gather around her like little students and pick up on the language she used. I also learned a lot of the right pronunciations and tenses of Italian by listening and learning the lyrics of songs.

We also believe that there is a critical period when we are young when language acquistion is easier. Since we have a few in the group that English was there second language we were able to reference their experiences. Elizabeth spoke Spanish only until she went to school and was easily able to pick up English. It was also mentioned that though much harder with the right tools you can learn language past the critical period.

We all agree that reading plays a large part in language acquistion because you pick up on all kinds of nuances in the language. Nurburak recalls that when she was first learning English at age 12, she read everything she could get her hands on it order to acquire more of the language.