This is not the only example we have of children being brought up without language around them and therefore without ‘nurturing’. The two most renowned cases of feral children, Victor and Genie, aged nine and thirteen respectively, who were each found in environments where little or no help and support was given to them throughout their childhoods. These children, who became experiments to a certain extent, were studied by doctors who attempted to rehabilitate them into everyday life and teach them how to speak, communicate and behave adequately. The results show that neither child was ever able to fully learn to speak or to communicate adequately. Their vocabulary remained very limited and grammar was not taken in or understood.
These findings support Lenneberg’s theory (to a certain extent) that children can only learn language during a ‘critical period’ between the ages of two and thirteen years old. Lenneberg studied lateralization extensively – the process by which the two sides of the brain develop specialised functions like those needed for learning a language. He discovered that the functions needed for language in an adult can only be found in the left hemisphere of the brain, however during infancy, these functions are spread across both sides of the brain and shift across to the left until they settle there at the age of thirteen. Lenneberg’s findings were proved, however the critical period has been found to be (in the majority of humans) from birth to five years old. Lenneberg’s theory was therefore based along the principles of nature and nurture because he believed that a child has an innate ability when it is young to learn and develop speech and language (lateralization) but that the child needs social support / contact surrounding it in order to utilise these faculties.
There are many different theories that follow the same principle of using nurturing as a way to teach a child how to speak. The Behaviourist theory, which first emerged in the 1900s, is probably the most well-known and widely-spread of these. The nurturing factors that are present in this theory are those of imitation / repetition – when the child copies what its carers say; positive / negative reinforcement – when the carer praises the child when it uses language accurately, and when the child is corrected or criticised when it has used language incorrectly; and consistency – when a carer acknowledges the same errors that the child makes with consistency (i.e. eventually the child will not want to be criticised and so learn the correct wording or grammar).
The way in which carers ‘nurture’ their children in the sense of language learning, is through the use of Child Directed Utterances (CDUs). These utterances differ greatly from the way in which an adult would communicate with an adult as they are used primarily to hold the child’s attention, so that although when it is very young and cannot yet understand language, the carer can convey commands, emotions and opinions. Examples of CDUs can be seen when a carer adopts a high pitch in their voice and stresses certain words. These exaggerated words are usually the most important as they are generally used to show the child what it should and should not do. For example the words ‘no’ and ‘good’. CDUs are therefore used as reinforcement (be it positive or negative) of what the child is doing, however at the same time teaches the child the importance of words and how to use them.
The argument for the nature aspect and the innate faculties which help the brain to develop language is also a strong one however. Chomsky’s idea of a Language Acquisition Device – an inborn mechanism or process that facilitates the learning of language – is also a prominent theory, however is not as well-known and widely believed as the Behaviourist theory. This is because Chomsky believed that with this LAD, a child was genetically programmed to speak without needing much input from the outside world. Chomsky compared language development to the growth of limbs – children do not grow limbs because they want to or because someone tells them to, but because they are predisposed to do so. Chomsky also believed that every human is born with the ability to speak any language but chooses which to use as to its environment i.e. a carer’s main input is the choice of which language to speak. He described the LAD as a system containing a large number of switches that determine the features of the particular native language. For example, there is a switch which determines whether the native language is based along the grammatical line of subject-verb-object (like in English) or subject-object-verb (like in Japanese). Chomsky’s theory fundamentally contradicts the Behaviourist theory as it states that children learn language through trial and error – forming sentences in their heads and repeating / using them until they correspond to their carers’ sentences. Positive and negative reinforcement is also therefore disputed.
In conclusion, after having studied such cases as Victor and Genie, and the different theories that have been proposed by various people, I believe that social environment is definitely the determining factor during the acquisition of language of a child. Every human is born with innate faculties that enable it to absorb and acquire language (unless it is severely mentally deficient) so it is therefore the human’s surroundings that shape its linguistic progress.
Bibliography –
History of the Mogul Dynasty in India – F. Catrou (1826)
The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language – David Crystal