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.