For centuries, scientists, philosophers and educationists have asked what's special about human language. Do we acquire our native tongue through a domain-specific, biological endowment, or is language learned by domain-general mechanisms in much the same way as other aspects of cognition? The nature/nurture debate continues to this day, but what has changed in recent times is the way in which scientists situate the beginnings of language acquisition, as well as our knowledge of how the brain processes language.
Before we proceed, a brief word on the different aspects of human language. Scientists draw a distinction between speech and language: speech includes the sound patterns of a language, whether intonation is rising or falling, how stress is placed within a word, how the speech organs produce tiny differences in sound such as /p/ at the beginning of a word, /p/ in the middle or end of a word, and so forth. This has little to do with meaning.
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