Word.ws English Dictionary

maturationism

maturationism noun: 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.

Noun

maturationism (uncountable)

  1. 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.
    • 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
    • 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

Examples of maturationism in a sentence

  • 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:

Origin of maturationism

From maturation + -ism.

Questions about maturationism

What does maturationism mean?
Maturationism means 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.
How do you use maturationism in a sentence?
Maturationism is a theoretical perspective that emphasizes the contribution of biological processes to children's development.
What part of speech is maturationism?
Maturationism is a noun.

Words near maturationism in the dictionary

  1. maturates
  2. maturating
  3. maturation
  4. maturational
  5. maturationally
  6. maturationism
  7. maturations
  8. maturative
  9. maturatives
  10. mature
  11. mature BL

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: maturationism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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