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María got me thinking, and searching, about the difference between acquisition and learning. I did not study linguistics in school, but love learning languages.
On the Internet, I found that acquisition is usually applied to the initial learning of a language by a child, and that language learning is usually applied to later language study. However, I also found that there are those who believe acquisition describes both the initial learning and the secondary learning.
Acquisition, they postulate, is the natural ability in both infants and adults to learn a language. They especially believe that the ability to grasp grammar is something innate. Children are intuitively able, they argue, to know that 'want cookie' fits the grammar structure, while 'I cookie' does not. Applying the same logic to secondary language acquistion later in life, they say that we all are naturally drawn to use the correct grammar structure.
I believe this means that we aren't satisfied with just mimicking what someone else is saying. We try to make sense of a structure (phrase). We want to know how the structure works. We want to try out what we've learned with other vocabulary, even before we hear how someone else would say it.
One idea that supports this belief, and something I found particularly interesting, is the fact that both a child and an adult can come up with grammar structures that aren't correct, based on grammar structures they've already acquired. For example, children can surprise us when they say 'goed' (instead of went). No adult would have said that. So, where did this 'grammar rule' come from? It came from the child's natural ability to recognize a grammar structure and apply it to something new. For example, a child may hear the verb 'snow/snowing/snowed' and deduce that 'go/going/goed' must also work. It seems logical. It fits the structure already heard. When the child is introduced to the illogical grammar rule that governs the irregular verb, he undauntingly tucks the rule away and tries it out on other verbs.
So, these folks describe acquisition as our innate ability to pick up a language and apply what we deduce to terra incognita. Language learning, they say, involves study. Whether it's our mother tongue or a foreign language, we learn it through language acquistion (innate ability) and language learning skills we've acquired along the way.
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