Nurture Strongly Influences Early Human Development

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Nurture strongly influences early human development. There has been much debate on whether nature or nurture determines the development of human beings over centuries, especially among the psychologists who are particularly interested in the development of new born infants. Although recent surveys demonstrate that both nature and nurture play crucial roles to affect people, this essay will mainly focus on the influence of environmental factors on early human development. There are two reasons to believe so, which will be discussed below, and one of them is that the environment is the key factor to stimulate the development of language ability and other motor behaviours; another one is that basically the surroundings cannot be reproduced, which makes each one of us unique as the personality varies from enormous range; yet the consideration of nature still needs to be recognised. A modern research indicates that the development of certain skills of the newborn can in a way be speeded up. According to Atkinson (1999), even though infants learn to speak full sentences until at least one year old, the stimulation from external environment tends to accelerate such learning process. “Children reared in an environment in which people talk to them and reward them for making speech-like sounds talk earlier than children who not receive such attention,” he says. There is similar situation of the development of motor behaviours that scientists conducted experiments which proved that through practice the emergence of such physical movement can also be accelerated to some extent (R. L. Atkinson, 1999). Another point should be noticed is that as the surroundings which we grow up with cannot be chosen or reproduced, the experience from our family backgrounds, from the cultures we are raised in, from the values we are cultivated, makes every individual unique
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