Tuesday, 14 October 2014

Child Directed Speech (Blog Copy)


 As Katherine has not yet developed to a complex enough cognitive level she misses auxiliary verbs and has no sense of awareness when it comes to contractions resulting in Katherine saying “I stuck” her mother recasts her sentence in “You’re” stuck in the hope of Katherine learning from social interaction, a theory put forward by Vygotsky as a means of language acquisition.  However, in some instances her mother does not correct her as I assume her mother wants to keep the learning experience a positive one to avoid stunting Katherine's growth lexically as a result of her feeling scared of being reprimanded. Whilst doing so Katherine's mother uses repeated sentence frames to make conversation predictable and easier to understand for Katherine, for example “You have got your socks on. What colour are your socks?” the use of questions are to stimulate the mind and for Katherine to develop her lexicon and further to reflect Katherine's mothers success with parenthood to other parents.

Katherine's mother also expands Katherine's utterances for example “And (2) Red and what?” encouraging her daughter to explore her lexicon and making it more likely for her to develop through the proximal zones of development. When Katherine correctly answers one of her mother’s questions, Kathrine’s mother responds with positive reinforcement praising her daughter, Skinner suggests this positive reinforcement would make Katherine's behaviour more likely repeated and exploration and furthermore learning as a result more probable. From the transcript we can assume a higher pitch and intonation present making the learning experience exciting as children want to impress those seen as an authority figure.

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