Discuss, with Illustrations from your own Observations and Study of Children Acquiring Language, what you Consider to be the Relative Importance of Social Environment and the Child's Innate Faculties in its Acquisition of Language.

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Stéphanie McDermott

Discuss, with Illustrations from your own Observations and Study of Children Acquiring Language, what you Consider to be the Relative Importance of Social Environment and the Child’s Innate Faculties in its Acquisition of Language

During the first four to five years of life, a human will learn how to articulate most of the sounds of English speech and acquire the ability to produce correctly structured sentences, take part in spoken dialogue and use language in order to learn, express emotions and to make personal contact. However, is the human’s ability to do this due to nature – innate language learning faculties that every human automatically possesses, or nurture – the belief that humans only develop language as a form of communication as a result of being exposed to language and being encouraged to use it from an early stage?

        The nature versus nurture debate is a conundrum which has interested humans for centuries, prompting even illiterate Indian Mogul, Akbar the Great, to carry out experiments on this precise subject. He placed thirty new-born babies into a home where mute wet-nurses cared for them, in order to see if these children would be able to learn how to communicate without the ‘nurture’ aspect of a normal child’s language development. The results were as follows - "When these children appeared before the emperor, they were found incapable of expressing themselves in any language, or even of uttering any articulate sounds. They had learnt, from the example of their nurses, to substitute signs for articulate sounds. They used only certain gestures to express their thoughts, and these were all the means which they possessed of conveying ideas, or a sense of their wants. They were, indeed, so extremely shy, and, at the same time, of an aspect and manners so uncouth and uncultivated, that it required great labour and perseverance to bring them under any discipline, and to enable them to acquire the proper use of their tongues, of which they had previously almost entirely denied themselves the exercise."

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        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 ...

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