acquisition of language

Is the acquisition of language affected by "behavior through social learning" as defined below? How so?

Would you define culture as our environment in the nature vs nurture debate? How so? It depends somewhat from which perspective ones comes, but by most definitions and theory, culture is part of our environment (nurture), which is learned and passed on through people and generations of tradition. Once acquired, it is long-lasting. Conversely, it is often not considered part of the nature side of the controversy where behaviors that are thought to be innate or instinctual found within the biology of the individual. However, other theorist, argue that it has aspects of both (Jung's theory of archetypes (universal cultural themes that are instinctual or innate).

DEFINITIONS

There is no consensus of a definition of the concept "culture", so let's look at some proposed definitions which lean towards the nurture side of the controversy as the culture, part of the environment, determines behavior and human nature (as opposed to the nature side of the controversy where it is argued that biology determines behavior and human nature):

? Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.

? Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.

? Culture is communication, communication is culture.

? Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.

? A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.

? Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.

? Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.

? Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.

? Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another (http://www.tamu.edu/classes/cosc/choudhury/culture.html).

THEORY

By theory, culture also falls on the nurture side of the controversy. On the nurture side, for example, you have the theory of cultural determinism and relativism.