By default, I will lean towards a nurture over a nature position. This is true for any debate on the topic and I have good reasons which I will get into. However, I have learned to acknowledge a propensity can be built in – a capability that humans get for free simply for being human – but guarantees nothing in the way of outcome.
I was born at 26 weeks in 1972. Survival rate was very uncommon at 26 weeks, but I was lucky that a new neonatal clinic had just opened up in a major city not far away that they were able to take me to. Blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, diagnosed with cerebral palsy, nevertheless my mother had the thought to put me through physical and occupational therapy for a few years and I was able to enter school with no signs of cerebral palsy at all. Maybe I never had it at all or maybe the physical therapy worked! No one knows. But I am convinced of the reality of brain plasticity; we can be “rewired” and I credit the care I received for my own.
I believe we have a lot of clocks built-in; certain things generally occur developmentally at certain schedules. But are they developing because the genes set them up on a schedule or does there need to be a social cooperation for activation?
The book mentions FOXP2 gene as a coordinator of sets of genes that seems to be uniquely human in providing us a potential for developing language – only if activated properly. It helps produce Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, gives us the capacity for recursion and complex syntax processing. So, that’s a score for nature.
But it’s not enough. You need back and forth – some social cooperation – some need to communicate for it to develop.
In my case, I was a late speaker. Yet, I would babble to my sister Linda, and she would act as interpreter. “Kenny wants a cookie”. Did we have a private sibling language? There’s no way to know but the first English my mother heard was when my sister wasn’t with us on the way to the special school I got my therapy at. I babbled to my mother something she didn’t understand several times. Finally, apparently I made a frustrated face and said, “WHERE LIN-LIN?”. This annoyed my mother who realized I probably could speak English already and just chose not to.
Jerome Bruner in the text proposes something he called LASS; Language Acquisition Socialization System – as an alternative to Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device. Meaningful social interaction would assist in developing language because biology and cognitive processes were simply not enough. That’s a position I agree with.
I also support a weaker version of Piaget, who believed in cognitive development being necessary and sufficient for language. I believe it’s necessary but it’s not sufficient. We need the biological propensity that we get “for free” for being a member of our species which I think supports such things as the development of specialized areas of the brain (although there are many ways it can develop if needed in cases where brain development occurs in other fashion), and a “critical period” clock that winds down after a certain developmental point. However, without the coordination and cooperation of caregivers and others, we won’t be able to develop language properly.
An amazing example in the text is the story of Jim, a hearing child of deaf parents who did not sign to him but had the TV teach him language. Jim developed flat intonation, poor articulation and unintelligible utterances and strange grammar. He also had poor comprehension. However, it only took a few months of therapy to fix his poor grammar and get his speaking to normal which to me demonstrates the exposure to TV, while not sufficient on its own as it lacked the social feedback mechanism of conversation, it nevertheless provided sufficient input for all of the pieces to be there, just scrambled. I think you could hold Jim in contrast to feral children who lacked input and could not develop language at all as a demonstration that some input – even if it is one-way like TV – is significantly better than none at all. (I believe this also holds true for tablet usage among the very young; that its benefit outweighs the negatives so long as the caregivers are also sufficiently interacting with them for proper two way communication on a regular basis. This is a controversial position but it isn’t crucial to my argument).
Humans are social beings with the built-in potential for developing into language creators and language users but only if activated socially in two-way communication based upon wants and needs. Is that a nurture or a nature position? It seems to be a bit of both.
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