NATURE VS.

NURTURE

Language, a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of

which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express

themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play,

imaginative expression, and emotional release. As defined by Henry Sweet, an English

phonetician and language scholar, stated that “Language is the expression of ideas by means of

speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination

answering to that of ideas into thoughts. Every normal person acquires during childhood the ability

to make use of language to communicate their wants and needs using a set of symbols, sounds or

even gestures. As we develop, our brain is wired to learn language that is exposed to us. However,

a debatable topic then occurred between the issue of Nature Vs. Nurture in human’s language

acquisition.

A major proponent of the idea that language depends largely on environment was the

behaviorist B. F. Skinner. He believed that language is acquired through principles of conditioning,

including association, imitation, and reinforcement. According to this view, children learn words

by associating sounds with objects, actions, and events. They also learn words and syntax by

imitating others. Adults enable children to learn words and syntax by reinforcing correct speech.

Children are being shown with correct utterances and comprehension in words by their

parents/guardians.

Behaviorists propose that a child’s environment is the most important factor in first language

acquisition, and if a child is exposed to ‘rich language,’ then ‘good habit formation and proper

language development will occur. It is possible that first language acquisition includes speech

imitation, but:
  Children do not imitate everything they hear; they appear to be very selective and only

reproduce unassimilated language chunks. Therefore, their replications seem to be

controlled by an internal language-monitoring process.

 Children learn the basic rules of language at around the age of five; the behaviorist theory

cannot account for the speed that first language is acquired.

 Children produce language structures that do not exist; you often hear, “Where I am?”

instead of “Where am I?”

 Children that acquire language from habit formation seem to memorize certain structures

prematurely. These phrases become lodged in their minds as unassimilated chunks of

information that they cannot incorporate into their own verbal expressions.

 Children produce many more sound-combinations than they hear, and understand many

more than they can produce.

 Children are exposed to language performance and not to language competence. Often they

are exposed to “debilitated” language, yet, they manage to extract the language rules from

these utterances and speak correctly.

The main proponent of the view that biological influences bring about language development is

the well-known linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky argues that human brains have a language

acquisition device (LAD), an innate mechanism or process that allows children to develop
language skills. According to this view, all children are born with a universal grammar, which

makes them receptive to the common features of all languages. Because of this hard-wired

background in grammar, children easily pick up a language when they are exposed to its particular

grammar. Unlike the behaviorist approach that does not take into consideration the child’s own

cognitive processes, Chomsky supports the idea that language acquisition has a biological

foundation. Facts that support this theory include the following:

 Children acquire language sounds in a certain sequence, and the first sounds that children

learn are those that are common to all world languages: a stop consonant followed by an

open vowel: thus a child’s first utterances are usually those found in words for ‘mother’

and ‘father,’ sounds such as ‘pa,’ ‘ma,’ ‘ba’ or ‘ta,’ as seen in French: maman, papa; Greek:

mama, baba; Hebrew: eema, aba.

 Children tend to learn language in the same sequence, suggesting that universality of

language exists and the environment alone cannot be responsible for language acquisition.

 Children acquire function words such as ‘or’ and ‘on’ and the less salient sounds connected

to possessives, pluralization and third person singular in a certain order. Interestingly, the

plural ‘s and other forms of ‘s’ are not all developed in unison.

The concept of nature thus refers to biologically inherited tendencies and abilities that people

haveand which may get revealed later on as they grow up. In contrast, nurture can be defined as

the different environmental factors to which aperson is subjected from birth to death.
Environmental factors involve many dimensions. They include both physical environments (a

good example is prenatal nutrition) and social environments (such as the neighborhood, media and

peer pressure). From the discussion on different approaches concerning language acquisition, one

thing is obvious that not solely nature (genes) or nurture.

Bibliography

“Theories of Language Acquisition”, SPARKNOTES.com

“Beyond Nature Vs. Nurture, What Makes Us Ourselves?”, David LindenCred, Natalie Linden,
NYTIMES.com
“Language”, David Crystal, BRITANNICA.com
“First Language Acquisition Development Theories: Nature vs. Nurture”, Lesley Lanir
MEDIUM.com