Nature and Nurture

There is area for discussion and debate in the world called "nature versus nurture" (Allen, 2007). The debate centers on the relative contributions of genetic inheritance and environmental factors to human development (Cherry, 2013). Lippa (2005) shows that nature is "all that a man brings with himself into the world" and illustrates "nurture is every influence from without that affects him after his birth". There are many factors influence infants by nature and nurture. Language, mother class are characteristics to influence infants' development. This literature review focusses on parents and natural influences on language for infants.

The question is what influence infants' language acquisition more? Parents or nature? Barnet & Barnet (1999) states that without listening to adult speech, children also can acquire knowledge. They can invent pronunciation in other words and bind pronunciation together in other words or they can develop their body language to let others know. Barnet & Barnet (1999) believe language is acquired from innate timetable. Some linguistic theorists support evidence that children are born with language acquisition ability. In addition, some other research indicates a view that infants who are 6 months of age can speak their own language. Maybe, the pronunciation is different but these unusual words have the same meaning. For example, 32 American babies and 32 Swedish babies who are all 6 months old were tested from the University of Washington and the University of Stockholm. The researchers found that American babies ignored "ee" many times, but for Swedish babies which are completely contradictory that they can accept "ee" (Barnet & Barnet, 1999). Thus, infants' language development can be influenced by nature.

In other words, Barnet & Barnet (1999) illustrated many neuroscientists think the language is influenced by our genes. However, these genes have not been identified. It is hard to identify the language influence on genes or parents. For example, even though the adopted children have some biological characters as similar as their biological parents but also their speech pattern is influenced by their adoptive parents. They also show that "a baby's first speech partner is usually her mother" language partner is very important for infants especially parents. Steven Pinker, a colleague of Chomsky shows that parents should "teach their children language". Other neuroscience textbook also recognized that giving children early language education will help children's language increase faster. They maintain that pathway parents educate their baby's language will influence infant's language acquisition. It implies that infants' language development can be affected by their parents. In addition, Sternberg & Grigorenko (2000) argued that infants will be affected by mother's