The ways in which humans acquire language is an excellent example of ways in which "nature" (or genetically determined capabilities) and "nurture" (or culturally engendered preferences and skills) coalesce in the average individual. All human beings are born with the potential to use language to communicate; even those individuals with profound cognitive disabilities have some innate language skills and all individuals with "normal" intelligence have the capacity to become fluent in - and even eloquent in - any of the human languages that have ever been spoken (Skeehan 19). We have from the moment of our birth all of the cognitive capacity that is needed to learn and use grammar and syntax as well as the ability to learn and use the vocabulary of any language. Indeed, our brains are so perfectly adapted (by the forces of natural selection and evolution) to acquire language that a substantial amount of the way in which we learn about everything (not simply) language arises from our cognitive ability to learn language (Bygate, Skehan and Swain 82).
However, there is also a substantial cultural ("nurture") element to language acquisition as well. For just as each one of us is born with the ability to learn any human language, the place and time and cultural group in which we grow up determines which language and which dialect of that language we will in fact speak. Any one of us could grow up speaking Navajo - which is a fact of biology, of nature. Only some of us do, which is a condition of culture, of nurture.
Bygate, M, P. Skehan and M. Swain (eds) Researching Pedagogic Tasks: Second Language Learning, Teaching and Testing. London: Longman, 1999.
Skehan, P. A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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