I want to recommend a great book to you guys, it’s ‘Constructing a language’ by Michael Tomasello. It’s a fascinating story of how exactly kids learn their first language, how do they figure it out.
Tomasello is a psycholinguist and is one of the stars of the Usage-based approach to language acquisition that claims that the Universal Grammar concept of Chomsky is nonsense (ie humans are not born with a innate set of grammatical rules) and that language acquisition is achieved by using the general cognitive abilities such as pattern recognition. There is evidence for it too: it turns out the infants only a few months old (before they are saying their first words, ~at the age of 1 year) can do pattern recognition in strings of pseudolanguage such as this one:
bidakupadotigolabubidakutupiropadoti
[notice that as you read this you can recognize ‘words’ quite easily]
Babies that are 8-moths old specifically react if they are presented with ‘words’ from that string afterwards, such as ‘tupiro’ for example.
They can even make generalizations and create abstract categories of words. If you give them a lot of pseudowords such as these: wididi, delili (syllabic structure ABB) they would be more sensitive to similarily constructed words in the future. Isn’t that amazing?
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