The Ecology of First Language Acquisition Nativism and Empiricism: An Appraisal and a Compromise

Abstract

—Contrary to the common belief that nativism and empiricism are two distinct theories of first language acquisition, both have some contribution to our understanding of the process of language acquisition; however, Neither of them is able to provide testable accounts of the details of language acquisition. As a result, Emergentism is proposed as an alternative with a wider scope to cover more of the realities about language acquisition. According to this paradigm, " formal structures of language emerge from the interaction of social patterns, patterns implicit in the input, and pressures arising from the biology of the cognitive system " (MacWhiney, 1998, P. 200). In this paper, it is attempted to match the picture of the first language acquisition with the metaphor of " the ecology of language " proposed by Brown (2000) for second language acquisition. The picture shows that genetic, physiological, cognitive, developmental and environmental factors before and after birth are at work, and language acquisition, in fact, is the consequence of interactions among all these factors.