English Audio Request

When a human infant is born into any community in any part of the world it has two things in common with any other infant, provided neither of them has been damaged in any way either before or during birth. Firstly, and most obviously, newborn children are completely helpless. Apart from a powerful capacity to draw attention to their helplessness by using sound there is nothing the newborn child can do to ensure his own survival. Without care from some other human being or beings, be it mother, grandmother, sister, nurse or human group, a child is very unlikely to survive. This helplessness of human infants is in marked contrast with the capacity of many newborn animals to get to their feet within minutes of birth and to run with the herd within a few hours. Although young animals are certainly at risk, sometimes for weeks or even months after birth, compared with the human infant the very quickly develop the capacity to support themselves. It would seem that this long period of helplessness is the price that the human species has to pay for the very long learning period which fits man for survival as a species.
It is during this very long period in which the human infant is totally dependent on others that it reveals the second feature which it shares with all other undamaged human infants, a capacity to learn language. For this reason, biologists now suggest that language is ‘species specific to the human race, that is to say, they consider the human infant to be genetically programmed in such a way that it can acquire language. This suggestion implies that just as human beings are designed to stand upright rather than to move on all fours, so they are designed to learn and use language as part of their normal development as well-formed human beings.