maturationism en · NOUN
Etymology
From maturation + -ism.
Meanings
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(uncountable) The theory that children acquire cognitive and behavioral abilities in a series of stages that reflect the biological development of the child's brain and body.
Here I would like to give two arguments for the selection of constructionism over maturationism as the correct underlying theory of acquisition.
1989, David Ingram, First Language Acquisition, page 73:The overall regularity of development explains why a maturational theory survived as well as it did, but pure maturationism was nevertheless a straw-man position, vulnerable to attack.
1982, Robert J. Sternberg, Handbook of Human Intelligence, page 614:Maturationism is a theoretical perspective that emphasizes the contribution of biological processes to children's development.
2007, Moncrieff Cochran, Rebecca S. New, Early Childhood Education, page 509:Much like perceptionism, maturationism is not an entirely homogeneous body of theoretical assumptions, but rather a kind of leading idea (in the sense of Chomsky, 1981).
2013, Juergen Weissenborn, Helen Goodluck, Thomas Roeper, Theoretical Issues in Language Acquisition, page 27: