“How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do?” - Bertrand Russell
One need only study a foreign language, or take a course in linguistics, to begin to appreciate the enormous complexity of human language. At every level – phonetic, phonological, morphological , syntactic, semantic and pragmatic – human language is an intricate system of abstract units, structures and rule used in a powerful system of communication. Once we appreciate the nature of language and the true depth of its complexity, we can also appreciate the remarkable, and in many ways fascinating feat that children accomplish in mastering it so easily.
Language development occurs in all children with normal brain function, regardless of race, culture or general intelligence. In other words, the capacity to acquire language is a capacity of the human species as a whole. A position held by many linguists is that even though different groups of people speak different language, all human languages have similar level of detail and complexity and all languages share general abstract properties; for example, all human language can be analyzed as systems consisting of discrete structural units, with rules for combining those units in various ways. That is, even though language differs superficially, they all reflect general properties of a common linguistic system typical of the human species.
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