This is an exemplar A* essay that can be used as a reference for AQA English language, paper 1 section B- Child Language Acquisition.
It is a response to the May 2020 paper- ‘Nature is more important than nurture in a child’s language development’
‘Nature is more important than nurture in a child’s language development’
Referring to Data Set 1 in detail, and to relevant ideas from language study,
evaluate this view of children’s language development.
Whether nature or nurture is more important in a child’s language development is highly
debated among linguists. Whilst many would argue that language development is reliant
on a child’s natural ability to learn and understand and the speed at which they
cognitively develop- as Jean Piaget would affirm, others would argue that the nurturing
and input received from caregivers and those around them has a more significant impact.
Since the children in the transcript are twins and are therefore likely to be biologically
very similar, we are presented with an interesting comparison to study the effects of
nurture vs nature.
On one hand, it could be argued that nature is the most important factor. The linguist
Noam Chomsky stated that all children have an innate understanding of and ability to
learn language. He called this the LAD (Language Acquisition Device) and would
therefore state that nurture or input received by the child makes no difference as all
children have this same ability. This can be linked with the stages of development- the
idea that children follow certain stages when acquiring language and seem to pass
through them at similar ages. The twins in the transcript are in the post-telegraphic stage
and would therefore be expected to be able to grasp more complex grammar and have a
wide range of vocabulary, made up of more than 2000 words. Evidence in the transcript
supports this theory, for example, both children are able to successfully contract auxiliary
verbs with the subject pronoun. In the transcript, Aaron utters the simple sentence ‘I’m
using it’, contracting the 1st person singular subject pronoun ‘I’ with the auxiliary verb
‘am’, to form the contraction ‘I’m’. Dillon also demonstrates this ability with the
declarative utterance ‘she’s a girl’. Here, he successfully contracts the 3 rd person subject
pronoun ‘she’ with the auxiliary verb ‘is’. This is significant as the linguist Roger Brown
investigated children’s use of morphemes (the smallest part of a word with meaning) and
suggested that the contraction of auxiliary verbs is one of the last children tend to learn.
Dillon and Aaron’s ability to use this morpheme aligns with the idea that they are
following the expected stages of development, possibly suggesting that language
acquisition is innate since all children follow these stages. This is also demonstrated by
their successful use of subject pronouns in the previous examples, indicating that they
are in the last stage of Ursula Bellugi’s pronoun development study, again supporting the
stages of development and Chomsky’s ideas that language is innate, since all children,
regardless of cognitive ability or input from caregivers move through these stages at
roughly the same time.
However, it could also be argued that nurture, for example input from caregivers in terms
of play or ritualised activities, is in fact the most important factor in children’s language
development as the two twins demonstrate different levels of ability, despite being
genetically identical. This could suggest that their different experiences have caused a
difference in their rate of acquisition. Bruner, an input theorist, would support this idea as
he suggests that input such as carrying out ritualised activities like reading before going
to sleep, attending a certain club whilst engaging in discourse with others can help build
a child’s vocabulary and linguistic ability, specifically citing the game peekaboo as
helping children understand pragmatic linguistic rules such as turn taking. It is possible
that the 2 children have had different experiences or received different input during their
lifetime, which could explain why Dillon often makes mistakes with the plural S
morpheme, for example in the utterance ‘do you want to play spidermans’, where he
attaches the plural s to the singular concrete noun ‘spiderman’, rather than using the
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