It can be said that language acquisition is one of the very essential and crucial stages in the development of a child. Together with this I also agree with the fact that cognition plays a very important role in language acquisition. This is because I think that a person’s thinking process plays a very important role and his /her thoughts frames what he/she speaks. I believe in the notion that what a person thinks is then translated into words. Cognition is a very important phase in child development and this is why psychologists place so much emphasis on it. I agree with the theory of   Jean Piaget that environment plays a very essential role in the development of language. I think that when children interact with the environment, the different people and the different objects and symbols is when they attatch different words and meaning to them. It is then that they get an understanding of which words to use in different contexts and scenarios. It is through the process of accommodation and assimilation with the environment that a child understands where and how to use different words and why to use them. This also enables them to differentiate between words that are used for different objects and different people.

During the process of my research I also came across another psychologist Lev  Vygotsky (1934/1987, 1978)  who placed an emphasis on culture in the process of human development. He pointed out that the culture provides with different “meditational means”, one of which is language. He says that even though an infant shows intelligence and vocal expressions in early childhood, it is not until early childhood that language becomes meaningful as the thoughts of a child become verbal. He also said that early psychologists suggested that consciousness was there from the beginning and was produced by nature, but in his opinion this was not the case. He said that it was produced and was a product of psychology. He divided childhood development into three stages that is infancy, childhood and middle childhood. In infancy there is a stage of pre speech thought which is characterized by (simple generalization, purposive activity, its highly individual and depends on immediate environment). There is also a stage of  pre intellectual speech (expression of emotions and primitive social change with gestures and vocalization). In early childhood children use speech to achieve cognitive ends and speech becomes proper. There is also structural and functional transformation that is from social speech to egocentric speech and (to guide and regulate action) and from inner speech to thinking in pure meanings which leads to “spontaneous concepts).

Thus I would like to conclude by saying that in order to understand the process of language acquisition and its relation to cognition, it is important to keep in mind all the theories and their shortcomings in order to come to a reasonable conclusion.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American poet quotes

“Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it”