English Language Activity 11.

11 PG225

In the transcript, a mother is shown to be reading an alphabet book with her son,
Amit a three-year old boy. The importance of child directed speech (CDS) is
demonstrated throughout the transcript, especially in the abundance of the use of
the Initiation Response Feedback (IRF) structure. This is exercised when a parent asks
a question and the child responds, and the parent offers a criticism, for example, in
terms of Amit, the mother asks, ‘is that a piece of the bridge as well?’ to which Amit
responds ‘yeah, pause, don’t matter’ and the mother responds ‘shall we put that one
on, yeah?’. The IRF structure is important in furthering the reaction between
caregiver and child, and gaining the child’s attention which is an important feature of
CDS. The ‘Feedback’ section of the IRF model is not dissimilar to Skinner’s operant
conditioning theory, in which he theorized that children’s language is shaped by
caregivers through positive reinforcement for stand grammar and pronunciation,
and negative reinforcement for non-standard linguistic usage, hence making them
more likely to speak in the correct manner. However this theory is heavily criticised,
firstly as negative reinforcement is rarely used as children are more likely to be
corrected on the truth factor of what they say rather than linguistic accuracy, and
that negative reinforcement can hinder language development and children don’t
respond to it. The effectiveness of IRG can therefore be questioned.

Developing from the initiation section, caregivers may often ask questions they know
answers to, for example when the mother asks ‘where’re you gonna put the bridge’
and exercises a fair bit of speech overlap, this draws a response from the child and
maintains the social interaction, whilst also illustrating that the parent knows more
than the child and is helping them to learn. This validates Vygotsky’s scaffolding
theory; that children learn language through support from caregivers who are
classed as a more knowledgeable other. Caregivers therefore lead children to their
zone of proximal development, an area which is just outside their current attainment
level. Whilst this scaffolding does not apply exclusively to CDS, it could include CDS
as a subunit of the aforementioned interaction.

Amit appears to be developing into the telegraphic stage; reduplication is abundant

in his vocabulary, ‘these ones these one like these ones are these ones are’ and
some reduplicated utterances to enforce or draw attention to a specific want or
need ‘gone no trains, that one pushing that one is pushing that bit, cause that bit,
got no trains’ remains present. Amit’s speech and utterances indicates he is
comfortable in the presented setting and wishes to engage in conversation with his
caregiver (mother) thus allowing for successful turn-taking, this is reinforced by
Bruner’s theory which suggests that the language behaviour of adults when talking
to children (known by several names by most easily referred to as child-directed
speech or CDS) is specially adapted to support the acquisition process of language.

The child does seem to have a loose grasp on syntax, for example; ‘yeah LOOK both
trains coming. Can put it that way’, Amit foregoes the need for the verb ‘are’ to
indicate the plural present that the trains are coming. This is evident that Katherine
Nelson’s findings which indicated that parents who utilized word choice correction
not pronunciation correction had children that developed more slowly. This once
again disproves the effectiveness of operant conditioning, and suggests that features
of CDS such as expansion (when caregivers repeat the grammatically standard
version of the child’s non-standard utterance back to them). In this sense, CDS was
properly utilized by the care-giver as seen when Amit uttered ‘done that hother
one?’ the mother responded with ‘other one?’ almost immediately correcting the
child’s virtuous error.

Amit being in the telegraphic stage does tend to omit function morphemes such as
articles, subject pronouns, auxiliaries, and verbal inflection, for example ‘got no
trains’, this indicates Amit understands what he wishes to tell his mother which he
no longer has more trains to play with. Amit appears to overextend when referring
to his toy trains as ‘these ones are a car ones’ implying all of that specific type of toy
train is the same as every other ‘car’ type train. The child also seems to struggle with
deixis as he assumes his mother will understand what he implies based off context,
for example ‘father christmas got this’, this further elaborates Chompsky’s theory of
acquisition that children are able to acquire language innately as shown by Amit that
he is able to imply demand and instruction,showing the child's natural predisposition
to learn language is triggered by hearing speech and the child's brain is able to
interpret what he hears according to the underlying principles or structures it
already contains (LAD).