Social interaction plays a major role in language development. If you take away the reinforcement of everyone being really excited when the baby goes "da-da" instead of "gur-gur" you would lose the learning. It's also much more difficult for blind babies to learn to speak because they can't see the mouth shapes being made by their parents which is a deliberate training exercise. I don't think they'd learn to speak whale any more than kids learn to speak other sounds in their natural environment. IANAL (Linguist), IANAB.
> I don't think they'd learn to speak whale any more than kids learn to speak other sounds in their natural environment.
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work either, but kids do learn the sounds of other animals and they love to reproduce them. Many kids can make dog or duck sounds before they can even speak like humans.
The problem is that of course, dogs, cats, ducks don't actually have a language, just a few different sounds, so that doesn't prove anything about kids' ability to understand a hypothetical actual animal language.
