Mrs Sophia Ahmad Mulla
Among most of the complex tasks carried out by humans in everyday life, language and communication is one topic which is understood very little, and is still shrouded in mystery based on the information available. The issue of studying human language and how it is acquired started several centuries back; the intellectuals concerned for such an issue include philosophers, psychologists, linguists, evolutionists and biologists who, with their relative field of expertise, explored the dimensions of language in their own terms. Knowledge of language and its acquisition has also been the concem of several approaches such as behaviorism advocated by Skinner, structuralism advocated by Saussure, cognitivism, advocated by Piaget, mentalism advocated by Chomsky, etc. (Bickerton 2014). This expansion of thought is what leads to early breakthroughs in language decoding which has led to the current understanding about the origin of language. The early descriptions include ’Cartesian Linguistics’, ’naturalistic approach and methodological monism’. As suggested by the names of these methods, those who adopted this methodology assumed that language is a system in the brain that is innate in some sense which grows as other mental systems do; according to the usual desiderata for naturalistic scientific research.
