Question

Explain the nature-nurture controversy in development. What is the evidence for nature? Fully explain how this applies to language development.

Answer 1

The never ending debate of nature vs nurture. There are two theories that account for the personality and pre-disposition of a person and these are known as nature vs nurture. The nature part is that defines the presence of biological factors that result in a personality. Though studies show that if a person has a newer environment or a changed environment, they tend to learn new things which might over ride the genetic pre-disposition of an attitude. It has been noted that people who have genetic factors, have an edge over carrying out certain action such as some people are inherently more aggressive and some people are inherently more calm, but practice and situation could change the attitude of a person. If nature was the only thing that would shape the personality of a person, the offspring of every murderer would always be a murderer and the offspring of every intellectual or a professor would always be a professor.

The evidence for nature is the  twin and adoption studies, in which Twins were brought up in two different environments and their personalities were compared. It was observed that even though twins were grown apart, their personalities were way more similar than those of the randomly selected people. Also, identical twins were more similar as compared to fraternal twins. This suggests that to a certain extent, personality is heritable.

Nature vs nurture debate also extends to language acquisition which was suggested by B.F. skinned. He suggested that the major development of language is by the environment that we are in. This suggests that language acquisition occurs through conditioning followed by associations, imitations done by a child as well as the reinforcements employed on the person. This view suggests that children would be learning by associating language with actions, events or objects. People would teach their children to learn words and through syntax which would correct the speech of a child.