Nature or Nurture
Nature or Nurture
A significant issue in developmental psychology is the relationship between
innateness and environmental influence in regard to any particular aspect of
development. This is often referred to as "nature versus nurture" or nativism versus empiricism. A nativist
account of development would argue that the processes in question are innate,
that is, they are specified by the organism's genes. An empiricist perspective would
argue that those processes are acquired in interaction with the environment.
Today developmental psychologists rarely take such extreme positions with
regard to most aspects of development; rather they investigate, among many
other things, the relationship between innate and environmental influences. One
of the ways in which this relationship has been explored in recent years is
through the emerging field of evolutionary developmental psychology.
One area where this innateness debate has been prominently portrayed is in
research on language acquisition. A major question in this area is whether or not
certain properties of human language are specified genetically or can be acquired
through learning. The
empiricist position on the issue of language acquisition suggests that the
language input provides the necessary information required for learning the
structure of language and that infants acquire language through a process of statistical learning. From this perspective, language can be acquired via
general learning methods that also apply to other aspects of development, such
as perceptual learning. The nativist position argues that the input from
language is too impoverished for infants and children to acquire the structure
of language. Linguist Noam Chomsky asserts
that, evidenced by the lack of sufficient information in the language input,
there is a universal grammar that applies to all human languages and is
pre-specified. This has led to the idea that there is a special cognitive module suited for learning language, often called the language acquisition device. Chomsky's critique of the
behaviorist model of language acquisition is regarded by many as a key turning
point in the decline in the prominence of the theory of behaviorism generally. But Skinner's
conception of "Verbal Behavior" has not died, perhaps in part because
it has generated successful practical applications.
Mechanisms of development
Developmental psychology is concerned not only with describing the
characteristics of psychological change over time, but also seeks to explain
the principles and internal workings underlying these changes. Psychologists
have attempted to better understand these factors by using models. Developmental models are sometimes computational, but they
do not need to be. A model must simply account for the means by which a process
takes place. This is sometimes done in reference to changes in the brain that may
correspond to changes in behavior over the course of the development.
Computational accounts of development often use either symbolic, connectionist (neural network), or dynamical systems models to
explain the mechanisms of development.
SOURCE:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_psychology
Vocabulary list:
1. Nativism = nativisme
2. Empiricism = empirisme
2. Empiricism = empirisme
3. Nature = alam
4. Nurture = memelihara
5. Innate = bawaan
6. Computational = komputasi
7. Sufficient = cukup
8. Decline = Tolak
9. Language
Acquisition =pemerolehan bahasa
10. Pre-specified =sebelum ditentukan
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The material focuses on Reading
Answer the
question bellow:
1. What the relationship between
innateness and environmental influence?
2. What is the nurture?
3. What is the nature?
4. What is the different between
nature and nurture?
5. Explain 2 things the
Developmental psychology?
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