Introduction
How children acquire language is an age old question which has always been a subject of debate. The crowning achievement of the human species is the language and all humans can learn about it. An average man can have a fluent speech and can produce approximately 150 words a minute. An average child by the age of five years have a vocabulary of 6000 words and can control almost all aspects of grammar and sound in their language. Now the big question that arises is: Is the language innate? or Is the language learned? This debate is ongoing from centuries and has raged many scientists who study the language. There are two sides of language learning by the children: first is called 'nativism' which is defined as the knowledge that originated in the human nature. This was strongly supported by Chomsky and he gave his strong views on the innateness of language. The second one is called 'empiricism' which means that knowledge originated in the environment and comes through the senses. This is strongly supported by psychologist Skinner who strongly suggested that there are no limits to what human beings can learn.
I strongly support the view that nurture has the most important influence on language learning on children. Human beings are capable of language because they have the opportunity, time and can apply very general learning laws. A child born and brought up in America would learn language words and accent according to the environment there though his parents may be Indians. I strongly believe that language is learnt through interaction with other socio-cognitive and cognitive skills. The language acquisition is mainly achieved through language use.
How Nurture affects the Language Acquisition in Children
A very important part of human's mental action and the process of acquiring knowledge is the learning of language. The ability to learn the language is something that differentiates us from other animals. Though animals can also learn language or language-like symbols, the humans have far superior abilities than animals to learn any language and this cannot be ignored.
Nurture means that we learn from the environment where we are and we are adapting to our surroundings and situations. When a child is born, the child has a blank slate often called 'Tabula Rasa'. The blank mind of the child learns a lot from the surroundings and environment he is brought up in i.e. the surroundings and environment have a great impact on the behavior and language that a child learns. Though all knowledge is gained by what we learn and through our experiences, the nurture of the childhood's characteristics like language, accent is influenced a lot by the people we spend our time with like our friends, but the most important are our caregivers i.e. our parents and grandparents.
One of the most important aspects of language learning that is affected by the nurture is the accent. Children always develop the accent linked to where they are brought up, as they are influenced a lot, by the way, others around them speak. For example, consider one child brought up in India and one child brought up in the United States, though both the kids can speak English well, but the accent in which both of them speak would be very different. This is because of the difference in environment and surroundings. The Americans have a different accent of speaking while Indians have a different accent of speaking. The kids also learnt the accent from their surroundings.
Humans are also influenced by the nurturing and environment more than the other animals in terms of modeling and imitation. For example, a child may imitate his father's action of giving him a toy by pointing out in the direction of the toy and asking him to hand him the toy that is on a high shelf.
There are various articles on behaviorism that point out that the kids draw a lot of language information from the environment and surroundings they are brought up in. As claimed by empiricist/behaviorists, language learning is an associative process as kids learns by association with others. They also claim that language learning is a similar process as any other cognitive development's learning process. Children learn the language from the environment by extracting linguistic information. Thus, as claimed by empiricists the language learning is the result of nurture and habit formation only. Bates in his study mentioned B.F. Skinner's view on language learning as:
"According to Skinner, there are no limits to what a human being can become, given time, opportunity and the application of very general laws of learning. Humans are capable of language because we have the time, the opportunity and (perhaps) the computing power that is required to learn 50,000 words and the associations that link those words together".
Adults play an important role in language learning of kids by speaking to them. The way they speak to the kids- grammatical, slow or repetitious way affects children way of accepting patterns in the language and experimenting with the speech. Kids often say a single word first, and then join them together to form an expression or a meaningful sentence. Thus, the way adults speak to the children, affects the children language learning process a lot.
Evidence in Support of Nurture
Environmental factors have many dimensions; both social environment like media, neighborhood etc. and physical environment like prenatal nutrition are included in it. There are different levels of impact of environmental factors on the development of human beings as there are multiple action layers involved like schools, family, friends etc. One example to prove affect of environment and surroundings on the language learning by children can be of Genie Wiley, the feral child.
The child was taken by Child welfare authorities in 1970 in Los Angeles from her abusive father. The case shows the impact of environment on the language learning by the kid. When she was just a few months old, she was tied to a potty in a dark, small room by her father. When she was discovered by the welfare authorities in 1970, she was 13 and a half years old. Since she had no communication with the outside world for all these years, she was mute and could not utter a word. Through all these years, she only interacted with her father and her brother who just grunted at her when they needed her to move or tie her up. Thus, Genie turned into an abnormal adult. Thus, the lack of social development and lack of interaction with any human being was responsible for the fact that Genie did not know any language when she was discovered.
Another example can be that of Sara. She was born in Istanbul to Turkish parents and was adopted by her uncle and aunt when she was a little baby. They later moved on to Belgium. Now she is 18 years old, and since her uncle is German and aunty is English, she can speak both the languages fluently, but does not know even a single word in Turkish. This proves that language is not innate and is learnt by surroundings and environment.
Children learn a lot from their caregivers. There is a lot of difference in language development of children who are into the normal socially stimulated environment and those who unfortunately do not have this environment. In a study by Moskowitz, he studied about a boy who had deaf parents. Though the boy was not deaf, but due to severe asthma, he was confined to his house only till 3years. The only way he could learn English during those 3 years was through television. As the communicative element was missing for the boy for 3 years, he could not understand or speak English when he was three years old.
Thus, from various evidence and arguments provided in support of nurture having more impact on language learning by children, I strongly believe that environment and surroundings in which a child is brought up affects the language learning process of any kid.
Conclusion
So Nurture or Nature? From above, it can be safely concluded that knowledge is originated in the environment and comes through the senses. The blank mind of the child learns a lot from the surroundings and environment he is brought up in i.e. the surroundings and environment have a great impact on the behavior and language that a child learns. Thus, nurture provides the most important influence on language learning in Children.
References
Bates, E. (2015). ON THE NATURE AND NURTURE OF LANGUAGE. Retrieved from grammar.ucsd.edu: http://grammar.ucsd.edu/courses/hdp1/Readings/bates-inpress.pdf
Chomsky, N. (2000). The architecture of Language. New Delhi: OUP India.
Dowling, J. E. (2007). The Great Brain Debate - Nature or Nurture? New York: Princeton University Press.
Kies, D. (1991). Language Development in Children. New York: Penguin.
Tomasello, M. (2009). Universal grammar is dead. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 470-471.
