The social bases of language acquisition

Abstract

A language is composed of conventional symbols shaped by their social‐communicative functions. Children acquire these symbols, both lexical and syntactic, in the context of culturally constituted event structures that make salient these functions. In the acquisition process children rely on cultural learning skills (i.e., imitative learning). These skills emanate from their ability to participate intersubjectively with adults in cultural activities (i.e., joint attention), which underlies their ability to understand the ways adults are using particular pieces of language. The development of communicative competence as a whole, including not only lexical and syntactic skills but also various pragmatic skills, depends largely on feedback about communicative efficacy that children receive from different interactants. This feedback is used by children to make further inferences about the conventional functional significance of particular linguistic expressions. This social‐pragmatic view of language acquisition obviates the need for a priori, specifically linguistic, format constraints on the language acquisition process.