Scientists today are mostly in agreement that children are born with the ability to learn languages, but they just don’t get around to even trying it until they are about one.  As Gracie Allen famously said, “When I was born, I was so surprised, I didn’t say anything for a year!”  Even after that, a child will not combine words until about age one and a half or put together any coherent sentences until age two or three. Yet it is widely accepted since the works of Noam Chomsky (Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, MIT) that children are born with language skills.  Chomsky refers to it as an innate “Universal Grammar” that humans alone possess and that exist in all children, regardless of what language they are exposed to.  So when does this innate ability “kick in”?  A baby can make language- like sounds such as cooing and babbling as early as a few weeks old,
indicating that he can use his lips, tongue and palate to form distinctive sounds. In addition, experiments have shown that children can differentiate, by reacting differently to each, between consonants and vowels. In fact, infants as young as six months differentiate between the sounds of different languages. Dr. Patricai Kuhl, in her 2002 paper "Born to Learn: Language, Reading and the Brain of the Child" tells us that “Infants raised in Sweden respond in a special way to the vowels of Swedish and do not respond in that way to the vowels of English”.    

Since they have the mechanics-ability to move their mouths in such a way as to produce distinctive sound, and they have the comprehension-ability to distinguish between different sounds, even similar sounds in different languages, babies should be able to speak even younger than they do.   A puppy can bark (or at least yelp, since his vocal cords are smaller) and a foal can stand, almost immediately after birth. If the ability to speak is just as innate to humans as the ability to bark or stand is to dogs and horses, it would stand to reason that a baby would be born talking.

And, in fact this is true.  The difference is the complexity of the task. A newborn baby cries and makes other noises and then graduates to coos and babbles and then to imitative sounds and eventually to full sentences that he himself has formulated, by the age of three. The innately acquired bark of a dog is a fairly simple one step process, whereas the innate language of a child is a complex series of linguistic mechanics, building sound blocks, calculating placement of words, observing reactions for success or failure and many more tasks that in another setting would seem positively daunting to master, even for a more mature, more intelligent being.