Question

what role does environment play in language acquisition?

Answer 1

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Given below are few points that will help you frame a complete answer.
Environment plays a significant role in shaping one's personality and mood.
A person living near a calm lake imbibes a similar serenity in his own life and often distances himself from the busy city life.
In the same way, a person living in a busy city expects a happening life and finds it difficult to accommodate in a quiet place.
The role that the environment plays has a greater impact on a person's personality in his childhood

Answer 2

While it is clearly admitted that normal behavioural development is determined by the interplay of genetic and environmental influences, this is much less the case for psychiatric disorders for which more emphasis has been given in the past decades on biological determinism. Thus, previous studies have shown that Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) were not affected by parental style. However, animal research suggests that different behavioural traits can be differentially affected by genetic/environmental factors.

Methodology/ Principal Findings

In the present study we hypothesized that amongst the ASD, language disorders may be more sensitive to social factors as language is a social act that develops under social influences. Using the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised, we compared the early characteristics of sensori-motor and language development in a large sample of children with ASD (n = 162) with parents belonging to different levels of education. The results showed that children raised by parents with a high level of education displayed earlier language development. Moreover, they showed earlier first words and phrases if their mother was at a high level of education, which reveals an additional gender effect.

Conclusions/Significance

To our knowledge this study may trigger important new lines of thought and research, help equilibrate social and purely biological perspectives regarding ASD and bring new hopes for environmentally based therapies.

Go to:Introduction

Although the nature/nurture debate may seem to belong to past history, the question of how genetic/experiential factors affect behavioural development remains very vivid [1]. Both genetic and environmental factors are involved in the determinism of aspects like temperament, but their relative weights may vary according to the trait being considered [e.g. 2]. As mentioned by Gosling [3], animal studies are very useful as they can reveal the interplay between different factors. Thus, horses with highly sensitive phenotypes [e.g. 4] may develop abnormal behaviour (such as stereotypies) as a consequence of unfavourable environmental conditions [e.g. 5] (See [6], [7] for reviews).

These animal studies provide useful framework to study normal and pathological behaviours of humans as a result of such interplay. Thus, twin studies show that parenting influences children's prosocial behaviours and acts as a “modulation” of genetic influences. This is especially true in the case of psychiatric disorders: despite a strong genetic basis [8], schizophrenia can been shown to be influenced by parenting profiles [9] as well as by factors such as an infectious disease during mid-pregnancy [10]. The weights attributed to genetic/environmental factors by authors are also often subject to variations along with “science history”, especially where psychiatric disorders are concerned [11].

Thus, Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) characterized by social and communication deficits and repetitive or stereotypic behaviour [12] have been for a long while attributed to environmental factors such as mothering (i.e. “refrigerator mother” [13]) or diseases (e.g. congenital rubella [14]). After reacting against the theory of lack of maternal affection during the '50s and '60s, research radically turned towards a neural and cognitive hypothesis [e.g. 15]. Since developments of genetic and neurology technologies during the '90s, more emphasis has been clearly given to biological (i.e. genetic) bases for these disorders (see [16] for review). The well-known social withdrawal of children with ASD has been attributed lately to deficits in the superior temporal sulcus voice selective regions: hearing and processing impairments based on developmental biological deficits could lead to social withdrawal [17].

Here again, animal studies suggest a much more complex situation. Thus, social experience is crucial for the development of the central auditory area in young songbirds [18], [19]. More interestingly, social segregation may induce the same deficits in a central auditory area as physical isolation and/or auditory deprivation [20]. Direct social contact with adults and the quality of interactions may strongly influence both vocal and perceptual development both in birds and humans [21], [22].

Researchers generally acknowledge that ASD are not affected by parental style but one can wonder whether as in animals [2], different behavioural traits are differently affected by genetic/environmental factors. The above mentioned results suggest that language development may be strongly affected by social factors and language abnormalities are the first observed deficit observed in more than half the families of children with ASD [23], [24].