The process of language acquisition has some basic requirements. During the first two or three years of development, a child requires interaction with other language-users
in order to bring the general language capacity into contact with a particular language such as English. We have already seen, in the case of Genie (Chapter 12), that a child who does not hear or is not allowed to use language will learn no language. We have also identified the importance of cultural transmission (Chapter 2), meaning that the particular language a child learns is not genetically inherited, but is acquired in a particular language-using environment.