How children learn language

What makes this fascinating

• Mastery from almost nothing — Toddlers absorb grammar no one explicitly teaches, from limited and messy input.

• The poverty of the stimulus — Children produce sentences they've never heard — Chomsky's argument that some structure is innate.

• What machines reveal — Language models need vastly more data than any child — which makes the child's efficiency more striking, not less.

Frequently asked questions

How do children learn language?

Toddlers master complex grammar from limited, imperfect input, with little explicit teaching — astonishingly fast. How they do it is debated between innate-structure and statistical-learning accounts.

What is the 'poverty of the stimulus' argument?

It's the claim that the language children hear is too sparse and error-filled to explain how reliably they acquire grammar, suggesting some innate predisposition for language — a contested but influential idea from Chomsky.

Is there a critical period for learning language?

Evidence strongly suggests children acquire language far more easily than adults, with a sensitive window in early childhood — though its exact bounds and rigidity are debated.

More summits in Language & Linguistics

• The origin of language

  No other species has it. How did human language begin — and why only us?

• Undeciphered scripts

  Ancient writing no one can read, like Linear A. Are these lost voices gone for good?

• Could we talk to animals?

  From whale song to bee dances — is any of it truly language, and could AI translate it?