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Dr Vasudevi Reddy
Dr. Vasudevi Reddy discovered that neonates as young as 6 months old are able to lie after doing research on children at the

University of Portsmouth's psychology department. Dr. Reddy found that 6 month olds are able to cry or laugh, even if there is no

available stimuli to illicit such a response and their deceptions become more complex as they get older. Dr. Reddy describes seven

categories of deception used between the ages of 6 months and 2 years of age.

Cited from: Gray, R. (July 1, 2007). Babies not as innocent as they pretend. In The Telegraph. Retrieved February 29, 2012, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3298979/Babies-not-as-innocent-as-they-pretend.html.

EDIT OF OPENING PARAGRAPH
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, comprehend, and produce language through words to communicate. The capacity to successfully use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocalized, such as speech, or manual, such as sign. Language acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language. This is distinguished from second language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.

The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes humans from other beings. Although it is difficult to pin down what aspects of language are uniquely human, there are a few design features that can be found in all known forms of human language, but that are missing from forms of animal communication. For example, many animals are able to communicate with each other by signaling to the things around them, but this kind of communication lacks the arbitrariness of human vocabularies (in that there is nothing about the sound of the word "dog" that would hint at its meaning). Other forms of animal communication may utilize arbitrary sounds, but are unable to combine those sounds in different ways to create completely novel messages that are automatically understood by another. Hockett called this design feature of human language "productivity." It is crucial to the understanding of human language acquisition that we are not limited to a finite set of words, but rather must be able to understand and utilize a complex system that allows for an infinite number of possible messages. So, while many forms of animal communication exist, they differ from human languages in that they have a limited range of non-syntactically structured vocabulary tokens that lack cross cultural variation between groups.

A major question in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infants from what appears to be very little input. Input in the linguistic context is defined as "All words, contexts, and other forms of language to which a learner is exposed, relative to acquired proficiency in first or second languages" It is difficult to believe, considering the hugely complex nature of human languages, and the relatively limited cognitive abilities of an infant, that infants are able to acquire most aspects of language without being explicitly taught. Children, within a few years of birth, understand the grammatical rules of their native language without being explicitly taught, as one learns grammar in school. A range of theories of language acquisition have been proposed in order to explain this apparent problem. These theories include innatism and Psychological nativism in which a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities, as opposed to other theories in which language is simply learned as one learns to ride a bike. The conflict between the traits humans are born with and those that are a product of one's environment is often referred to as the "Nature vs. Nurture" debate. As is the case with many other human abilities and characteristics, it appears that there are some qualities of language acquisition that the human brain is automatically wired for (a "nature" component) and some that are shaped by the particular language environment in which a person is raised (a "nurture" component).