Clark surveys that henceforth, English-speaking children learn approximately ten words a day to reach a vocabulary containing 14,000 words by age six, and from then on, they add at least 3,000 words a year until they are seventeen (1995: 393).The study of first language acquisition is as complex as the process itself since there are different theories and approaches and, most importantly, because language acquisition differs cross-linguistically and individually. English-speaking children aged two to two and a half years old have generally acquired vocabularies consisting of 500 words or more (Barrett 1995: 392). The third phase begins at some point during the third year of life with children learning 50 or more words per month. Vocabulary growth is much quicker now (20-50 new words per month). The second phase begins around 16-18 months of age when children start to use words in a referential manner. Various linguists have observed that children seem to undergo three phases of language acquisition (Kuczaj & Barrett 1986: ix-x): The first phase begins approximately around 10-12 months of age with children producing idiosyncratic sounds and adding only one to three words per month to their lexicon. The assumption that the child is biologically equipped with fundamental linguistic knowledge can additionally be justified with the fact that deaf children babble (Goodluck 1991: 141). This innate knowledge goes under the name of universal grammar was influentially laid out and discussed by Chomsky. The general idea is that the child is equipped with a set of blueprints that define and limit what a human language can be like. The linguistic system involves rules too abstract and complex to be learnt without the aid of innate knowledge about the nature of the system. They claim, Language acquisition can only be accounted for if we assume that children work with knowledge of principles of grammar. According to Goodluck, this logical problem is the reason why the notion of an innate and unconscious linguistic knowledge is quite common among (psycho)linguists (1991: 3). The fact that children acquire implicit and productive knowledge of adult grammar-even though they do not obtain explicit instruction in the linguistic rules of their specific language and their language input is severely restricted to the speech that they hear-is called the logical problem of language acquisition (Goodluck 1991: 3). Even though there are a number of empirical studies and data, there is still a significant need for further research on children’s language acquisition. First language acquisition is the study of when and how infants and children get a command of their native tongue (Goodluck 1991: 1). But only since the 1970s, considerable attention has been paid to first language acquisition in research (Kuczaj & Barrett 1986: ix). Linguists have long been intrigued with children’s acquisition of their native tongue. Appropriately enough, in his pioneering study A First Language, Brown (1973: 63) poses the rhetorical question whether “the first words re a kind of magic”. Language-and especially language acquisition-seems to be the closest thing to magic. Introduction: First language acquisitionĥ.
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