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Abdul Yunusa

English 102 H

Final Research Paper 3

First Language Acquisition – Nature or Nurture

If one isolates a baby in a room with no human interaction and sound, would he or she

acquire a human language? There has been a long-term debate on whether nature or nurture or

perhaps both influence the acquisition of language. Undoubtedly, genes play an essential role in

determining many psychological characteristics such as intelligence, aptitudes in art, and

behavior. Hence, there’s high feasibility that gene has a predisposition in the acquisition of

language. Many theorists claim humans are born pre-equipped with an innate ability to acquire

language; these nativists believe there’s a module that embeds the principles of grammar in the

human brain. These theorists term this approach as ‘nativism.’ Nativists strongly claim that the

development of language is the outcome of innate awareness that lies within any healthy infant.

Conversely, opponents of the ‘nativism’ approach criticize that the primary factor of language

acquisition in children lies with the environment. This approach is term as ‘behaviorism.’

Behaviorists propose that kids are born with a tabula rasa - a blank slate with no prejudice about

the world or dialect, and that these children are first influenced by the environment and gradually

shaped by different reinforcement techniques; behaviorists use sociocultural reality to explain the

first language acquisition. They believe that language learning is all about the development of

patterns and the result of nurturing. I believe the first language acquisition is a developmental

task that relies on both the child's biological facet and the environment.

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Fundamentally, language acquisition is the mechanism by which children develop the

efficiency to learn and understand language, as well as to produce and use words to interact.

Acquisition takes place passively and unintentionally through subconscious processing. In other

words, infants don't need specific guidance to learn their first language(s), rather they appear to

just ‘take up’ the language in just the same manner as they learn to turn over, crawl, and move.

The acquisition of the first language is essentially a phase in which children master their primary

language – not necessarily their mother tongue, and it is mainly concerned with the manner in

which they transform their environment into a pertinent linguistic voice. However, Linguists

differentiate between language acquisition and language learning. Summarily, language learning

is an intentional act while language acquisition is an unconscious process. “The acquisition of

language includes systems and representation. The ability to communicate effectively requires

mastering a broad range of tools, including phonology, grammar, and extensive vocabulary”

(Bonvillian 18). Children’s ability to mold their blabbing unconsciously and rapidly to actual

sentences adhering to these myriad rules and syntax proves there is something unique about the

brain. Vivian Cook claims that language is complex, and it can be seen as a hereditary legacy, a

collective interpretation, the expression of individual identity, the declaration of societal

uniqueness, the sum of attested data, or electrical actuation in a dispersed network (11). The

question eventually arises: do babies have an innate capacity to grasp and produce all these

properties of language, or is their language learning attributable to social contact and more

general cognitive tools?

The first approach to nature-nature controversy in language development will focus on

nativism (nature). It is commonly the notion that language development is the innate capacity of

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humans. Nativists believe gene is a factor that aids children to acquire their first language.

Chomsky claims that “we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic

perception of the language around us, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of

language” (Aitchison 107). Nativists believe human knowledge stems from structures and

processes, which are present in the mind at birth, and these complexities are responsible for how

a language develops. In Syntactic Structure by Noam Chomsky, he shows various logical

evidence through the use of logos to assert that children are born equipped with Universal

Grammar (UG). Chomsky presents and defines universal grammar as “the machine of principles,

circumstances, and guidelines that are components or properties of all human languages” (Cook

18). It clarifies that ‘acquiring’ first language is innately facilitated by the capacity of our mind

to build a complex syntax. Children understand language so easily and quickly because they

know, in the model, what it is that they have to learn. A kid has a 'blueprint' of the universal

language in his mind. All he needs to do is figure out how his own dialect blends into these

universal patterns (Goodluck 6). The brain is programmed to construct an unlimited set of

sentences out of the infinite list of terms. Chomsky believes that this component supplies

children with the ability to infer the syntactic structure and rules of their local phrases quickly

and viably from the inadequate proposals provided by adult language users (Clark 12). He

believes that children ‘come’ with an innate acquisition device that encompasses the intrinsic

rules of language.

In addition, Chomsky claims that ‘Universal Grammar’ is seen in the overgeneralization

of children’s conversations. This is where children make mistakes, such as 'my foots hurt' by

applying a general directive of plurality to an irregular object (“On Language” 15). Another

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instance is through “the use of an inflection '-ed': I ‘seened’ instead of 'I saw’ is another frequent

error infant makes” (“Syntactic Structure” 6). The appearance of the theoretic ‘Universal

Grammar’ asserts this since these errors would possibly not have been imitated or learned from

any primary caregiver. In Child Language Acquisition, Lieven further claims that the language

development period of children occurs roughly at the same age and similar pattern in every

normal child regardless of the diversity of dialects (33). Furthermore, Lieven presents

Chomsky’s idea of “‘recursion,’ and defines it as ‘the replication of a structure within its single

parts’” (15). This theory shows that recursion makes it possible to form complex sentences. For

instance, we can expand the sentence “‘she believed Ricky was innocent’ to ‘Lucy believed that

Fred and Ethel knew Ricky had insisted he was innocent’” (Clark 37). Chomsky argues that all

languages share these properties despite their variations. Hence, children are pre-programmed to

acquire their first language. Subsequently, an article on viviancook.co.edu illustrates that “A bulb

becomes a flower; some cells become a lung. We don’t say that the bulb 'learns' to be a flower,

or the cells 'learn' to be a lung. Instead, we say the bulb and the cells naturally 'grow' (“The

Language acquisition” 18). From this inductive reasoning, it’s irrational to say that the child

'learns' language rather than language ‘develops.’ This idea makes it logical to analyze that

language acquisition is the development of the mental organs to naturally yearn for

communication and accumulate the means to do so, but not to learn. When you consider the time

and efforts put into teaching children language both in the home and at school, and the period

which is spent attempting to expand the vocabularies of infants, it undeniably asserts that

children do not ‘learn’ a language but they ‘develop’ a language. From pivotal vocabulary to

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complete sentences of almost undefined length, it can be observed that children indeed have a

phenomenal innate capacity which supports the ‘Universal Grammar (UG)’ proposal.

Furthermore, language develops at about the same age in children regardless of the

environment they live in. “Surely it is not because all mothers on earth initiate language training

at that time. There is, in fact, no evidence that any conscious and systematic teaching of language

takes place, just as there is no special training for stance” (Lenneberg 125). This usual pattern of

children all over the world acquiring a language without been necessarily taught proves language

is set in motion by an innate clock. They all go through a similar phase, from blabbing to

forming simple sentences as they acquire language. An article on bibalex.org shows that

phoneme discernment is the first step of language development. Babies process the noises they

sense in the early weeks of their lives. They acquire the ability to comprehend velar phonemes

before four months of age and start making one-syllable patterns such as ‘pa’ and ‘ba,’

characterized as cooing (“Language Acquisition” 2). The third level, babbling, is seen between

the ages of six and eight months. Children are capable of creating multi-syllable phrases that

incorporate consonants and vowels, such as ‘ba-ba-ba’ (Aitchison 7). While these gestures are

irrelevant, this ‘pre-language’ allows the infant some knowledge of speech's role in society.

Children use individual terms or holo-phrases to make wishes or convey thoughts around twelve

and eighteen months. The vocabulary of infants pushes past 50 words by the age of twenty

months, and they continue using a number of two-word pairs or proto-sentences, such as ‘daddy

come’ (Hurford 33). Toddlers can generate up to three hundred (300) terms at age two and

comprehend five times as many. Finally, the language expands to hundreds of words by age

three, semantic and prosodic skills improve, and the grammar gets similar to an adult's speech

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(Denise 43). Babies are naturally ready to “unsheathe” the principles of the language themselves

without consciously coached to do such, just as kittens naturally open their eyes when they're a

few days old. It can be concluded that language is universally obtained in a similar way and that

the underlying structure of language at its deepest level might be as a result of a language

acquisition device (gene).

Also, in Biological Foundations, Eric Lenneberg argues that language acquisition is not

only innate but also has a critical period. Lenneberg proposes that while language capacity is

innate, the environment must trigger it. A child cannot acquire a language without an

environment that encourages language-learning opportunities; the latent capacity will not be

recognized, at least not in full (18-21). Within a given time frame, the infant must experience an

atmosphere of language, or the chance to learn a language may be missed. Lenneberg provides

extended proof by analyzing recuperation from aphasia. He observes the case of two girls named

Genie and Isabelle. Isabelle was about six years old when she was found. When Isabella’s

intellect was first measured at the age of six and a half, her mental age seemed to be about

nineteen months. She produced a croaking tone instead of a natural voice. Through intense

preparation and a supportive atmosphere, Isabelle’s intelligence advanced (Clark 75). On the

other hand, Genie, however, was not this fortuitous. In Rethinking Innateness, J.L Elman shows

that Genie did not socialize in the first 13 years of her life. Genie was robbed off any stimulus

and, as a consequence, never learned any language (10). This case is important to look back on,

as it shows facts to not only assert the biological capacity to learn a language, but also a sensitive

period. S Curtiss explains that Genie was able to learn the morphology and syntax of English

only after years of teaching and was still in the process of learning it when she was 18 years old

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(16). These two cases harness Lenneberg’s ‘critical period’ theory, and it explains the nature of

language acquisition outside this sensitive period. This illustration deduces the notion that the

mind’s ability to acquire language declines at puberty. “To better understand the critical-period

theory, an evidence can be seen with immigrants developing a second language or native accent

after puberty” (Richmond 66). This learning is impaired with age, possibly because of non-

language-specific variables that still conflict with the individual's capacity to learn a foreign

language or speak like natives.

Comparatively, both of these theorists employ logos to logically highlight the essence of

nature to set the pace for children to ‘acquire’ their first language. Unlike Chomsky, Lenneberg

narrows the innate ability of language acquisition to a critical period. This principle argues that

any average human being is born with certain language abilities: an inherent set of rules

identified as ‘Universal Grammar’ by Chomsky. The inborn potential can only be realized if

within a given period an infant is introduced to human language. Lenneberg’s parameter can be

analyzed as the crucial duration during which the inborn language concept of Universal

Grammar is triggered. By comparing both shreds of evidence, there is without a doubt that nature

is the genesis of language acquisition. Children naturally acquire the ability to speak, just as

barking comes naturally to dogs and grunting to pigs. This complexity of language makes

cognitive scientists to define language as a psychosomatic organ and an instinct (Pinker 18). The

term ‘instinct’ conveys the notion that language is commonly characterized as a pattern of

stereotyping, unlearned, and a genetically based behavior or action.

Secondly, children’s ability to communicate with language depends on their habitat

(nurture). B.F Skinner argues that dialect is learned by the notion of conditioning, including

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association, imitation and reinforcement. In this perspective, children learn vocabulary by

associating sounds with things, behavior, and activities (Cowie 10). “They practice vocabulary

and grammar by imitating others” (Clark 16). Adults encourage children to learn vocabulary and

grammar by emphasizing proper expression. As an example, when the child says ‘food’ and the

primary care giver smiles and gives him/her some as a reward, the child will find this effect

encouraging, thus, improving the child's language growth (Cowie 11). A collection of utterances

is encouraged as the infant understands the interactional importance of this set of sounds. For a

child to develop a language, he or she must be in a linguistic environment. A theory by Lev

Vygotsky shows that language development stems from social interactions (Pinker 53). He

proposes the ZPD theory, and he explains it as “a level of development obtained when children

engage in social interactions with others; it is the distance between a child’s potential to learn

and the actual learning that takes place” (Boom 45). This reveals that social interaction plays an

impeccable role in children’s language development. Olsen et al explain that “Vygotsky believed

that language develops from social interactions, for communication purposes. Vygotsky viewed

language as man’s greatest tool, a means for communicating with the outside world” (Lanir 5).

This fact proves that a child isolated from human beings or a natural linguistic habitat does not

acquire any dialect. Steven Pinker states that language entails morphology, chronology, and

syntax. Mostly, conversations must transpire in order to create vocabulary; language cannot be

learned passively. While imitation and routine have a part to play in language learning, children

appear predisposed to develop speech and skills by being able to map language (55). To sum up,

Kids mimic the patterns and gestures they perceive around them and receive positive feedback

(which may take the form of recognition or simply good communication) for doing so. Thus,

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stimulated by their surroundings. They continue to adopt and reinforce these sounds and

behaviors until they develop 'habits' of proper grammar use.

Additionally, behaviorists believe that the infant's atmosphere and cognition is the most

significant element in the development of the first language. Once the child is exposed to a rich

vocabulary, strong pattern forming then good communication will emerge. Jean Piaget claims

that without an exchange of ideas and communication with others the entity would never have

grown to group his activity into a cohesive whole (17). Social in the developmental sense

includes a human society in which each contribute to the knowledge of the group as a whole and

is individually interested in the transitions and changes in the equilibrium that emerge within the

group. Such a system of interpersonal interactions replicates the features of mental functioning

(Piaget 19-23). Karin Stromswold claims that the child's ability to communicate knowledgeably

relies on a child’s level of development, and this develops between reinforcement of stimuli and

reaction (47). According to David wood, “this perception leads to a variety of explicit projections

before children will discover how to complete and comprehend what they speak and understand”

(38). Young children at some levels of growth are unable to articulate thoughts that require the

desire to perceive the world from another person's perspective. The advancement of intellectual

growth can be observed in the following phases which entails Piaget's sequential and linear

understanding of the essence of intellectual development: the development of sensory-motor

thought, formation and growth of abstract thinking or pre-conceptual expression, formulated or

intuitive representation, threshold of organizational thought or pre-operational awareness, and

emergence and growth of structured operations (Richmond 12-14). Thus, while behaviorism

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looks at what can be learned and assessed, cognitivism is about what develops in the learner's

brain.

In a nutshell, language acquisition is a cognitive process that develops from the

interaction of both innateness and the environment. Skinner believes that children master

language by the concepts of conditioning. However, imitation and repetition alone cannot justify

any of the ways that children have developed communication; they're not phrases they've learned

from adults. Children master simple language laws at the age of five; behavioral theory cannot

account for the rate and frequency at which the first language is learned. Kids say phrases that

are not adult imitations; specifically, they use inflective over-generalizations such as ‘sheeps.’

Children appear to acquire vocabulary in the same order, indicating that there is universality of

language and that the surrounding alone is not accountable for language learning. A child is

naturally equipped with a communication system, but this system is not a human language.

Hence, children need to be in a linguistic environment in order to acquire it through their

biological language acquisition capacity. At each level, children can only manage a certain

volume of linguistic data. Language cannot be described solely as an offshoot of general

intelligence, even if human beings clearly use general cognitive skills while communicating.

Likewise, infants do not have set bits of pre-language knowledge. Instead, they are naturally

oriented to the production of linguistic details. Children’s ability to cope with unpredictable

variation is pre-ordained, but language-specific principles have to be learned from experience.

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Works Cited

Aitchison, Jean. The Articulate Mammal: an Introduction to Psycholinguistics. Routledge, 2015.

Ambridge, Ben, and Elena V. M. Lieven. Child Language Acquisition Contrasting Theoretical
Approaches. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013.

Bonvillain, Nancy. Language, Culture, and Communication: the Meaning of Messages. Rowman
& Littlefield, 2020.

Brown, Roger W. Psycholinguistics Selected Papers. Free Press, 1972.

Chomsky, Noam. Syntactic Structure. Mouton, 1969.

Clark, Herbert H. Psychology and Language. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

Cook, Vivian. Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Cowie, Fiona. “Innateness and Language.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford

University, 16 Jan. 2008, plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-language/.

Denise Cummings-Clay, Hostos Community College. “Child Development.” Human Language

Development | Child Development, 2018, courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-hostos-
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Elman, Jeffrey L. Rethinking Innateness: a Connectionist Perspective on Development. MIT

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Lenneberg, Eric H. Biological Foundations of Language. R.E. Krieger, 1984.

George, Yule. “First Language Acquisition Explained.” SCIplanet, 2018, pp. 2-3. JSTOR,
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Goodluck, Helen. “Cognition, Environment, and Language Learning.” Language Acquisitionby

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Hurford, James R. Language in the Light of Evolution II: the Origins of Grammar. Oxford
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Lanir, Lesley. “First Language Acquisition Development Theories: Nature vs.

Nurture.”Medium.com, 2 Sept. 2019, https://medium.com/@llanirfreelance/first-language-
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Piaget, Jean, et al. The Psychology of the Child. Basic Books, 2000. Pp 17-23.

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. Greenbee Publishers, 1998.

Richmond, P. G. An Introduction to Piaget. Routledge, 2006.

Stromswold, Karin. “The Heritability of Language: A Review and Metanalysis of Twin,

Adoption, and Linkage Studies.” Language, vol. 77, no. 4, 2001, p 47. JSTOR.

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