How do we learn language?

As discussed in the previous class, humans already have the ability to map words to their meanings when we are just children, and this is actually a very important way of how we learn the language. This reminds me how I learned different words and their meanings throughout childhood and all the way even until now, both in Mandarin and English. Interestingly, what I have observed around me is that most people can map words with the correct meaning pretty well, so that no one would relate the word ‘dog’ with just a part of a dog but to the whole animal. I guess human’s ability and intelligent is really amazing. However, this also brings up the questions that how do people learn language when there was initially no language around? This also relates to the part in class that how a brand new language develops among deaf people; I guess this is the same as how people first come up with language.

Another question that I have is that: could some color blind patient is actually related with the wrong mapping of name of different colors? For example, if a child was taught that the color black is called ‘yellow’, wouldn’t the child believe that the color is actually yellow and be mistaken as a color blind person? As conclusion, I think that the process of learning language is really amazing.