Nature versus Nurture in Bilinguals’ Language Acquisition

Abstract

Nature versus nurture is a controversial question in psychology. Many psychologists are debating whether genes or experience play a more important role in human development. Some researchers emphasize the influence of learning on language acquisition, while others emphasize biological influences. Language is the way that humans could use to convey their thoughts and communicate with each other. But the question is that is language innate or learned? This paper does not pay much attention to the role of genes and experience in the overall development of human beings, but this study aims to explore what role they play in the development of language. The researcher would explore this question based on the bilingual's language development. That is because bilingual speakers can be proficient in both languages, which allows us to examine the influence of their innate and acquired environment on their language development. The researcher has studied and analyzed the previous academic papers and examples about the nature versus nurture of language and summarized them to draw the conclusion of this paper. It can be concluded that both nature and nurture play an important role in the development of language acquisition. This is because we need our genes and brain to build a language acquisition device (LAD), and then, after we have the ability to learn a language, our acquired environment acts on our language system. As we interact with people around us later in life, we gradually acquire words and grammar, and our language system is then complete.