A cultural model for the acquisition of language: implications for the innateness debate

In contrast to other aspects of species-specific development, language development represents both the universal thrust of biologically based capacities and the socially differentiated results of human experience in culturally structured worlds. This article presents a theoretical approach for understanding the ways that children's language development is channeled through the culturally constructed microenvironment, or "developmental niche." The approach is illustrated with examples from research on mother-child speech in a rural Africian community and American parents' discourse about their children's language development. The cultural model proposed here suggests a wider range of environmental input than has been acknowledged by innatist views, and proposes that there are cross-cultural differences in the ways that language functions in representing experience to the self and communicating about it to others.