[ThomPete]

I don't think what you say contradicts my point and I am in agreement with what you are saying to some extent.

I am not saying there is no understanding going on at all. What I am saying is that when my son uses the iPad or iPhone he does not know what the different things mean (i.e. he can't read that it says Video) he just knows what it do when he presses the icon.

I can't say to him:

"Find the LinkedIn application"

Only if I have done that a couple of times in front of him will he be able to.

With regards to the discussion about language, then yes that is a very complex discusion :)

My own theory is that we are born "pattern recognizing feedback loops" and thus our ability to recognize those patterns and recognize that we recognize them is the foundation of our ability to learn a language. Language is simply an abstraction of our natural ability to do symbolic manipulation.

It's like assembler (our basic symbolic manipulation skills) and the higher level languages (our more developed culturally inherited languages)