Language acquisition is the study of the processes through which learners acquire language.

First Language Acquisition studies the infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas Second Language Acquisition deals with acquisition of additional languages in both children and adults. The Linguistic Period: a - The Holophrastic Stage After one year, children have learnt that sounds are related to meanings; they begin to go through the one-word which is considered for them as one-utterance. The words in this stage serve three major functions. First, they are linked with a child own action or desire for action. Second, they are used to convey emotions. Third, they serve a naming function. b - The Two-Word Utterances: Babies begin to produce two- word utterances which can show different combination of word order. In this stage, the words lack morphological and syntactic markers but we can notice that there is a word order. c - Telegraphic Stage: At this stage, the word forms are beginning to varry; inflectional morphemes begin to appear in addition to the use of simple prepositions. The child pronunciation is closer to the adult one. III - Morphology: Some inflectional morphemes will appear, indicating functions of the nouns and the verbs. The child is going to use all the verbs he knows in ing form, in the same way, all nouns with plural. This is referred to as the process of Generalization. For the past inflection, the child is going to use the verb go with {ed} and say goed. By the time, the baby learns further rules, he is going to over generalize them. IV - Syntax: The childs speech shows strong evidence against imitation because his own production remains different on morphological and syntactic level. Many studies about the development of syntax in the childs language have shown that the use of the child language never violates the English syntactic rules. In the two-word stage, the baby either begins his utterance with a wh-word or only uses a rising intonation. By the Telegraphic speech, he may not use inversion; he would use negation, and may use double negation regularly. Motherese: It means that there are some parents who try to simplify their speech to their children using simple forms at the early stages.

Rationalism:

The rationalists believe that the reason is the chief source of knowledge. They stress on the fact that children acquire language so readily because it is in their genes. They also believe that children are born with a capacity to acquire many languages. But these two schools agree on some points. First, they agree that children have to be exposed to a certain language. Second, they also agree on learning. Do children learn language by imitation? Close observation of babies acquiring their first language show that children do not imitate and that also children do not hear the corrections. Children behave as efficient linguists; they form linguistic rules and apply them by generalization. The over-generalization process does not occur in adults speech and this is another proof against the hypothesis of imitation. Do children learn language through enforcement? Of course children do not learn their language through enforcement. And this example shows this: Child: nobody dont like me Adult: no, say, nobody likes me Child: nobody dont likes me Expansion: It means that there are parents who try to expand their childrens simple forms into proper sentences.

The cognitive processes involved in producing and understanding linguistic communication