Daniel Favano PSY 3301.02 Strang SA-1 In my opinion, the debate over Nature vs.

. Nurture in a child's development is one of the most important elements in an infant's development. This debate spans over almost all topics in developmental psychology, especially the presence of language. Why do we have it, and other animals don't? Does education, or lack thereof, affect the capabilities of a person's language? Fromkin, Krashen, Curtiss, Rigler, D., and Rigler, M. (1974) studied what we call today the Genie Case. They discovered that her neglect affected the development of the left hemisphere of her brain, which caused irreversible damage to her linguistic system. This argument supports the idea of a critical period in which we as humans are genetically limited to a certain time frame to develop critical language skills. Another example could be the tendency for an infant to lie. Children lie as early as infancy in the form of crying purely for attention. Is that learned, or is it natural. Infants can observe that I cry, they come. However, Koko the gorilla blamed the removal of a sink from a wall on her pet cat. This reveals that lying may not be something that is learned through observational or environmental processes, but rather just a genetic instinct. Regardless of the answer, the fact that this argument has been a powerful element in developmental psychology, especially in children and infants, is undeniable.