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The Nature-Nurture theories are two contrasting views that offered to explain how human acquired language in the history of language acquisition. The naturist state that language acquisition is biologically determined while nurture proponent states that language acquisition is shaped by experience. Immanuel Kant, the naturist stated that knowledge can’t come from experience alone, there is pre-existing structure to organize and interpret the experience; therefore, human have the innate ability to acquire language. On the other hand, John Locke proposed tabula rasa that human are not born with innate ideas and knowledge was sprung from sensation, which proceeds to reflection. For example, children learn the concept of “cat” when their mother points to a physical dog and says “that’s a cat”. The sensation of seeing a cat is directly stored in the brain as the "cat concept".
The main proponent of the naturist t is Noam Chomsky. He argues that human brains have a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate mechanism or process that allows children to develop language skills. He also proposed an argument - the poverty of the stimulus (POTS) claims that a child may acquire a language even though the data itself is too poor to determine the language; for example, children are able to acquire language from pidgin and convert it into a more grammatical complex Creole. In addition, children are able to learn any kind of language when they are born and the stages of language development occur at about the same age in most children, regardless of their cultures and environment stimuli. Most recent evidences came from the study of chimpanzees which indicated that they have the ability to communicate by use signal to refer and symbols to represent but they do not have language because they lack the ability to form syntax, phonology, morphology and discourse as human does.
On the other hand, B. F. Skinner believed that language is acquired through principles of conditioning, including association, imitation, and reinforcement. According to this view, children learn words by associating sounds with objects, actions, and events. They also learn words and syntax by imitating others. And social interactions play an important rule in child’s language development that adults enable children to learn words and syntax by reinforcing correct speech. One of the supporting studies came from De Villiers (1978) that the way adults use language with children (motherese) is a very successful form of teaching child acquires language. In addition, the wild children, Victor of Aveyron and Genie, provide some evidences that there is critical period for the children to acquire language and language acquisition begun after childhood is never quite as successful as language acquisition begun earlier
There are some critics of nurture view of language acquisition, the most obvious evidence is that there is infinite number of sentences in language and it is impossible for children to learn all of those sentences by imitation. In addition, children make consistent grammatical mistakes such as mouses instead of mice, and Billy hitted me , incorrectly adding the usual past tense suffix –ed to hit. Thus children tend to over-generalize the grammar rules and errors like these can’t result from imitation or reinforcement because adults generally use correct grammar when address to children. Moreover, if language acquisition took place according to motherese then researchers would achieve greater success in teaching animals such as chimpanzees the human grammar. Although the researchers made some “mistakes” during the process of language acquisition, those “mistakes” serve as the guidelines in searching the answer to this mystery that we trying to solve for a long time. For this, Steven Pinker, proposed a Learnability theory stated that there are six conditions a theory of language acquisition must meet. The theory must comply with the learnability, equipotentiality, time, input, cognitive and development in children’s ability in language acquisition. The theory must include the basis of valid assumption about the nature of the input data and it should be comply with the cognitive abilities in children’s development time course and offer an explanation for the fact of development. Moreover, the theory must be consistent with the fact that children are capable of learning any natural language as their native language. And Dr. Petitto added that the theory must address and be consistent with what is known about the developing brain (biological plausibility).The debate of nature-nurture pendulum will not stop even though we have the innate ability to learn language, none of us can gain the language ability without the stimulus form the environment.
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