The __________ approach to language acquisition posits that people are born with the innate capacity to use language, which emerges as they mature.

Are humans born with an innate capacity for language, or is it acquired throughexposure and social interaction?

ill in the Blank QuestionFill in the blank question.The approach to language development proposes that there is an innate mechanism that directs language development in humans.

ong views about the human mind would like to showthat children’s first few steps are steps in the right direction.In the past, debates about the acquisition of language centered on the same themeas debates about the acquisition of any ability – the nature versus nurture theme.However, current thinking about the language acquisition has incorporated theunderstanding that acquiring language really involves a natural endowmentmodified by environment (Bates and Goodman, 1999; Dehaene-Lambertz, Hertz-Painter & Dubois, 2006; Lightfoot, 2003; Maratos, 2003). For example, the socialenvironment, in which infants use their social capacities to interact with others,provides one source of information for language acquisition (Snow, 1999;Tomasello, 1999). Thus the approach to st

Biological theorists explain language acquisition as a process that is controlled by biological forces capable of being observed. They cite a biological imperative for humans to develop language, which is observed in the spontaneous creation of languages by groups of people who had not had previous contact but who came to live in proximity to each other. These languages become more complex over time, as children within the communities are exposed to it and generate more complex forms. The form these languages take initially are those of pidgin languages, or languages that contain simple subject and action words. As the groups share more time together, the languages evolve into creole, a more complex language with more complicated structures, such as verb form variations.This evolution has also been seen among a community of deaf children who began living together in 1990 and who formed a signed language system within their community. Over time, the language grew more complex; however, older children in the community had significant difficulty incorporating the more complicated language structure.Even languages that have been spontaneously generated share common language structures across settings, despite the lack of contact between people in these settings. This suggests that there is an aspect of language which is common to all people. Researchers commissioned a study to examine sign language complexity in the deaf children who lived together. The number of unique syntactic constructions is shown in Figure 1.Figure 1 Number of unique syntactic constructions in a group using sign language, compared between ages at ten-year intervalsThere is also evidence that language ability is heritable. Twin studies found that about 50% of the overall variance in language may be genetic. In particular, syntactic language was found to be strongly hereditary, while vocabulary knowledge was weakly hereditary. Verbal ability scores of children were compared to their sibling or their twin and plotted in Figure 2.Figure 2 Correlation of verbal ability between siblings (Top) and twins (Bottom) Question 31Which of the following, if true, would weaken one of the arguments made in the passage? A.The R-squared value was not statistically significant in the chart comparing twins’ verbal measure scores.B.The R-squared value was not statistically significant in the chart comparing siblings' verbal measure scores.C.There was a statistically significant difference between age groups and the number of syntactic constructions in 1990.D.There was a statistically significant difference in the overall number of syntactic constructions between years across all age groups

The structural-innatist theory of language acquisition was developed as a result of which of the following discoveries? a. Children learn through positive reinforcement of incorrect or immature sentences. b. Repeated drilling does not change a child’s stage of development. c. An interaction exists between biological and environmental factors. d. Children innately learn the rules that govern sentence construction.