Bias and Innate Capabilities in Children Learning Report (Assessment)

There is ample evidence suggesting that children have innate learning capabilities and biases when mastering a language.

1. Children possess native speaker intuition that allows them to devise correct grammatical forms without prior exposure to those. Each language has its grammatical principles, such as word order in a sentence, and children learning a language can deduce what it is even without grammar lessons
2. Children witness adults speaking with all sorts of mistakes and mispronunciations, but somehow learn the correct and universally understandable version of a language from these vastly different examples. It means that they somehow filter mistakes and individual speech patterns to single out what matters, suggesting the existence of built-in concepts of language
3. Even the youngest children can divide a very quickly spoken sentence in their native language into words, suggesting that the concept of the word is built-in and universally understandable
4. De Villiers’s experiment shows that children understand the implications of different grammatical forms even without lessons in grammar
5. Children’s novel utterances cannot be copied from anyone, since they do not appear in adults’ vocabulary. It means that children have the innate capacity to create new language constructs and utilize them actively
6. Temple University Experiment suggests that even the youngest children have an innate knowledge of a verb’s argument structure
7. Children acquire words in their vocabulary not based on their frequency in the adults’ use (determiners and prepositions) but based on their functionality (verbs and nouns), meaning they have a built-in understanding of how language works
8. “Whole object assumption” refers to the idea that a word designates the entire object rather than its part or property. Shared among numerous cultures, it is an example of a built-in language assumption shared by children and adults alike
9. “Mutual exclusivity principle” refers to the idea that there is only one word for any given object. It is another example of a universal built-in language assumption shared by children and adults alike
10. “Sammy’s error” refers to the children’s propensity to use grammatical constructs that are absent in their native language and, therefore, cannot be learned from it, but are correct in other languages. It suggests that children have an innate capacity for language that configures to a specific language as they develop their skills

To summarize, a multitude of experiments and observations suggests that children have innate abilities and built-in concepts when it comes to studying the language.