Nature Or Nurture

This essay will focus on the four theories of language acquisition and centre around whether they are nature or nurture and how this results in each theory differing from one another.
The theory of behaviorism was developed by Burrhus Frederick Skinner. He believed that children developed language through imitation and reinforcement from the environment surrounding them, suggesting that it was nurture responsible for a child developing language rather than nature. Skinner thought that a child could develop language through positive reinforcement, he believed if a parent was to reward their child for babbling it would increase the frequency of the child being vocal. He believed, however, if the parents were not to provide positive reinforcement the child would not further develop from babbling on to producing structured speech as they would not be encouraged to move on from this. After awhile of going through the stage of babbling, the child may begin to vary their babbling noises and may even accidentally produce the sounds ‘mama’ or ‘dada’ which leads to excitement from the child’s parent as they believe their child is trying to say the words ‘mammy’ or

Chomsky’s theory of nativism argues Skinner’s theory of behaviorism, as he believed that a child does not have to be taught a language but there are structures of the brain that control the production of speech. He believed each child is born with ‘Universal Grammar’ and as long as they were in the presence of another producing speech that they too would also begin to acquire language naturally, which provides that Chomsky’s theory, unlike Skinners, is that he believes that language is acquired through nature rather than nurture. He believed that regardless of whether the child was rewarded or not for producing speech they would acquire the language eventually without positive or negative reinforcement from the child’s