A CLOSER LOOK AT THE ISSUES IN FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: NINE MAJOR ISSUES REVISITED

Abstract

Concerning issues in first language acquisition, the present paper explores positions in theory- making, asyntacticity of early child language, Piaget's idea about children's logical thinking, Vygotsky's and Chomsky's controversy over the origins of language, the relationship between communicative competence and other abilities, the stage where child's utterance is counted to be communicative, reflecting on the relationship between language and thought, the idea of modularity, the role of emergentism in language acquisition, and the authors’ perspectives about different explanations on language acquisition in general.

Keywords

• Acquisition
• Innateness
• Connectionism
• Syntacticality
• Emergentism
• Modularity.