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 microenviroment, 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.