[1] Noam Chomsky (1995) proposes the theory of Universal grammar, supporting that a child's language abilities is a result of nature.
This is commonly observed in classrooms, where teachers utilize consequence or reward systems to motivate a student to succeed.
[3] The Critical period is the first few years of life during which the brain is most sensitive to language learning and development, typically defined to be from age two to puberty.
Though, vocabulary learning does not seem to be as sensitive to age, mastery of grammar and pronunciation of a language is not likely to be on par with the standard of a native speaker's if it is learnt past the critical period.
[5] Generally, researchers agree that the critical period learning curve echoes the data for a wide variety of second-language acquisition studies.
Wormith et al. (1975) found that even from birth, infants are sensitive to fundamental frequencies in non-linguistic stimuli and are able to distinguish pure tones that differ only in F0.
[9] Nazzi et al. (1998) have also demonstrated that infants even at an early age are sensitive to pitch differences when presented linguistic stimuli.
[15] Looking at the sounds created by infants during their developmental stages (crying and comfort utterances followed by babbling and eventually acquiring or comprehending words) prepare for telegraphic speech.
Having language-related developmental delays in childhood could cause problems in a child's development[19] such as emotional, behavioural and literacy difficulties.
Research has shown that children with developmental delays have a higher rate of having emotional and behavioural issues, and this is likely due to their frustration with having difficulties in communication.
[20] Clinical visits to an SLP helps to lower the severity of a potential communicative disorder manifesting during childhood.
[21] In this aspect, bilingual children often display greater facility than their monolingual peers, in tasks such as judging the grammaticality of semantically anomalous sentences or in identifying and explaining language contrasts.