First Language Acquisition by Infants

Abstract

Children do not reproduce their parents' language exactly. The way that children acquire their first language so quickly and easily has interested people for thousands of years. Considering the richness and complexity of this system, it seems improbable that children could ever learn its structure (Saffran, 2003).The main question in all modern studies of child language acquisition involves finding out what types of mechanisms underlie the acquisition of human language system. This case study was a developmental descriptive one that addressed three infants acquiring their first language in Iran (Kerman). The three infants were followed for a period of 12 monthsto see if they all followed a systematic pattern in language development. It seems that in the process of language acquisition, we can accept the possibility that first language learners come to the learning situation with an innate knowledge about language.