Historically, many theories of development have pitted biology, or nature, against environment, or nurture. for example, attempts to explain the ease with which babies acquire language focused either on the ways in which parents teach language to their children or on the emergence of the infant's innate language abilities. behaviorist b. f. skinner believed that language development could be explainedtirely by principles of learning, including imitation, reinforcement, and discrimination.

arguing against the nurture position, linguist noam chomsky maintained that language is far too complex to be mastered so early and so easily through learning alone. instead, chomsky maintained that our language capacity is inborn more recently, developmentalists have concluded that both skinner's and chomsky's theories have some validity but that neither is completely correct; rather, it is the interaction of nature and nurture win a specific social context that accounts for the ease with which children acquire language. in this exercise, review he ollowing examp es of language use and decide whether ea㎝ prov explain your reasoning
example
when michelle was an infant, she was able to perceive differences among the spoken sounds of many languages. as she grew, her preference for hearing her native language actually influenced the development of her brain. now a teenager, michelle can no longer perceive certain speech sounds form languages other than her own.