Human languages, despite their vast diversity, share common features. These shared characteristics, known as language universals, suggest a shared human capacity for language. Languages may sound distinct, but their fundamental organizational principles often align, pointing to inherent mechanisms within the human mind that shape how we acquire and use speech or signs.
Universal Stages of Language Acquisition
Evidence for language universals is the consistent stages infants navigate during language development. Regardless of the specific language spoken around them, children progress through predictable milestones in a uniform sequence. This journey begins with babbling, from birth to around 11 months, where infants produce a universal range of sounds, experimenting with consonant-vowel combinations like “ba-ba” or “mu-mu-mu.” Babbling allows babies to practice sounds and sequences needed for language, without focusing on meaning.
As children approach their first birthday, between 11 months and 1.5 years, they enter the one-word, or holophrastic, stage. During this phase, infants use single words to convey more complex ideas, such as “milk” potentially meaning “I want milk” or “Where is the milk?”. Speech at this point becomes more language-specific, moving beyond universal babbling sounds. Around 1.5 to 2.5 years of age, children combine words into two-word utterances, often forming noun-verb or noun-noun phrases like “doggie bark” or “daddy go car.” This “telegraphic speech” omits non-essential words while still effectively conveying meaning, demonstrating an innate grasp of basic sentence structure.
Language Creation Without Direct Models
Evidence for language universals emerges from situations where individuals, particularly children, spontaneously create structured languages without a complete linguistic model. This phenomenon is evident in the development of pidgin and creole languages. Pidgins are simplified communication systems that arise when speakers of different languages need to interact, often for trade or labor, characterized by limited vocabulary and basic grammar.
When a pidgin becomes stable and is acquired as a first language by a new generation of children, it evolves into a creole. Creoles possess fully developed grammatical structures, expanded vocabularies, and native speakers, demonstrating the human mind’s drive to instill complexity in language. An example of this process is the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, deaf children in Nicaragua, who had no access to a shared language and initially used individual “homesign” gesture systems, began to interact.
These children spontaneously developed NSL from their rudimentary gestures, transforming it into a complete linguistic system with a stable lexicon, grammatical categories like nouns and verbs, and words for abstract concepts. Successive cohorts of younger signers introduced linguistic complexity, demonstrating how children, even without a pre-existing language model, possess an inherent capacity to create and refine language structures. This organic development of a complex language from limited input supports innate linguistic abilities.
The Biological Basis of Language
The existence of language universals is also supported by findings regarding the biological underpinnings of language acquisition. One such concept is the “Poverty of the Stimulus” argument, which proposes that the linguistic input children receive is insufficient, or “impoverished,” to fully explain their native language’s grammar. Children often produce grammatically correct sentences they have never heard before, suggesting that their linguistic knowledge extends beyond mere imitation or exposure. This implies an innate, pre-wired understanding of language principles that guides their learning.
The “Critical Period Hypothesis” reinforces the biological basis of language, suggesting a specific timeframe during which optimal language acquisition occurs. This period, thought to extend from early childhood to around puberty, indicates a biological window for learning language with native-like proficiency. Research suggests that while learning a second language is possible later in life, achieving native-like grammar and accent becomes more challenging after approximately 17.4 years of age. This decline points to biological constraints that limit language learning abilities beyond this period.
Neurological studies also provide support for an innate language capacity by identifying specific brain regions associated with language functions. Broca’s area, located in the frontal lobe, is primarily involved in speech production and articulation, coordinating the muscle movements needed for speaking. Damage to this area can result in difficulties producing speech, a condition known as Broca’s aphasia. Wernicke’s area, found in the temporal lobe, is largely responsible for language comprehension and processing spoken or written input. Damage to Wernicke’s area can lead to fluent but often meaningless speech and impaired understanding of language. These specialized areas, predominantly in the left hemisphere for most individuals, suggest a biological predisposition for language.