Imitation and reinforcement are the most crucial tools for children's language acquisition. Evaluate.

By looking at the way children are encouraged to speak in certain ways by their care-givers, we can see how this reinforcement affects their development and use of language. Firstly, we can look at the use of imitation and reinforcement within transcript A. In transcript A we can see Tom (aged 2) and his mother conversing about his bike in the garden. From the outset, we can see Tom’s mother encouraging him by imitating his language. Here she repeats his utterance, “it makes noises”. This suggests to Tom that what he said was in fact grammatically correct. Tom then replies to his mother, “yeah”. This suggests that he fully understood the meaning behind his mother’s response and can recognise that he has been corrected. However another example from the text shows where Tom has actually responded to his mother's correction by using the correct term. Tom says, "the bike (.) the dad bike", which we can see is not grammatically correct. His mother models the correct adult term by responding, "dad's bike". In this next quote, it is interesting to see the development of the child's understanding in such a short window of time, Tom replies with, "yeah (.) the dad (.) dad's bike (.) dad's bike mum (.) dad's bike". This suggests again that the child can recognise when he has been corrected, as well as being able to understand what he had said incorrectly and how to change it to make it correct. It appears that at the start of the quote he starts to say "the dad (bike)", however he remembers how his mother had modeled the correct term for him, and applies it to his own language. Although this finding does not represent that this child will continue to remember the correct term beyond this transcript, it does suggest that at a certain age children are in fact able to acquire language simply by being shown how to use it.

Language Change - Words that have changed diachronically

Nice - From the latin "nescire", originally meaning "to be ignorant" and "to be silly", but today means "to be pleasant". "Nice" has undergone amelioration, as it has shifted from having a negative meaning, to meaning something a lot more positive. It could be said that the essence of the word has ranged from foolish and cowardly to elegant and effeminate.

Investigative Piece Introduction

Hypothesis: "Women will express more feelings based ideas in written language than men, who will express more informative based language."

Introduction:

For my investigative piece I will be looking at the difference theory and how it is applied to modern day forms of communication. We can learn about how gender language stereotypes can be portrayed and represented by analysing the language use of each. There are many theories and hypotheses that can be tested within this aspect of language, however for this essay I will be focusing on the difference model. This consists of a series of six contrasts that display the most common ways that male and female speakers may differ. These are: status vs support, independence vs intimacy, advice vs understanding, information vs feelings, orders vs proposals and conflict vs compromise. With the data I have collected, I plan to base my findings on the hypothesis of information vs feelings in particular. To test this, I have collected a substantial and reliable amount of data including portions of social media accounts from a variety of British bloggers. To make the data fair and true, I took an equal amount of examples from three males and four females. From this I am able to compare and contrast the amount of information-type statuses compared to those that show feeling. For this hypothesis, perhaps the  most general theory is that men typically use more information messages and women use more feelings, and in this piece I will consider theories and ideas that both support and oppose this view.