Nature-nurture debate

One of the most important issues in the study of language development is the extent of language innateness. There are two contrasting viewpoints on how human knowledge is achieved: rationalist and empiricist. These perspectives correspond to the theories of nature and nurture respectively. The rationalist view originated from the philosophies of Plato and Descartes, it is based on the premise that certain fundamental ideas are innate. In other words, they are present from the time of one’s birth and are therefore genetic. The empiricist perspective, in contrast, rejected this doctrine of innate ideas and stated that all knowledge is derived from experience. Among the most influential works of the empiricists were those of Locke and Hume. According to Locke, the mind at birth is a ‘tabula rasa’, or a blank state, upon which sensations write, determining future behaviour.
The rationalist perspective developed into the Chomskyan viewpoint that children possess neither the cognitive, nor the perceptual processes that enable them to pick up a language, in an essentially impoverished language environment. As such, it must have an innate structure or a language acquisition device. This was later replaced by the notion of universal grammar, that is, a set of principals and parameters enabling children to learn any natural grammar. The empiricist angle, on the other hand, developed into the behaviourist viewpoint that language is learned entirely using the processes of reinforcement and conditioning. A leading proponent of behaviourism, Skinner, argued that language is acquired by the same mechanism that governs all other aspects of animal and human behaviour.
But labelling contrasting views as rationalist or empiricist means simplifying the nature-nurture debate. Whilst questions regarding, which processes are innate and which processes must be in place for a language to develop, are fundamentally important; behaviour ultimately results from the communication of nature