Tom transcripts


According to B F skinner (1953) imitation and reinforcement are basic learning structures for learning, which is used by not only humans but animals too. In terms of child language acquisition this is the process of a child learning, understanding and correctly interpreting language. This “active” process is called operant conditioning, which consists of 3 types of consequences of behaviour, these are;

Positive reinforcement – is receiving a reward when certain behaviour is performed, for example a parent praising their child for correcting pronouncing a word or standard phrase or utterance, to praise them in the hope they will replicate this in the future. This is evident in text A, where Tom who is age 2years; 7months is talking to his parents but in this text he is helping mend bikes with his mother and father. E.g. Echoing “I need to fix dad’s bike OK” “you need to fix Dad’s bike”, this is a form of positive reinforcement because the parent is clearly agreeing with the child and what they have said and therefore encouraging them.  

Negative reinforces typically are characterized by the removal of an undesired or unpleasant outcome after the desired behaviour. For example a parent may correct the child for misspelling or pronouncing a word, this way the child will see that they are incorrect and therefore will have less chance of replicating the same mistake. This is evident in text b where Tom completed a jigsaw with his mother. E.g. “is these drawing cartoon network logo cup of tea mum” “um (.) No (.) it’s a moving shadow mug (.) it looks like the cartoon network logo (.) but it’s actually something else”. This is an example of negative reinforcement because the parent has corrected him for being wrong.

In text A, Tom is helping his parents with mending bikes. At this point in his development at 31 months old he should be at the telegraphic stage of development which is using 3 or more words in a sentence, however he has already surpassed this stage and has entered the post telegraphic stage of development because he is able to form more than that and also use some grammatical complex sentences. Even if he still has trouble with his agreement inflection which is evident when he says “is these drawing cartoon network cup of tea mum” not only does this utterance fails to reach and inflection agreement but because of the format of the transcript it is hard to tell if this is a interrogative. This is because there is no paralinguistic features in the text that can be identified, e.g. tone which we would expect to go up at the end of the sentence which would signify the child is asking a question.

Comments

  1. Unknown3 December 2016 at 08:08

    Some good knowledge. Avoid simply regurgitating learned theory - evaluate how far it is supported by the data and other theories - did you write the title down?

    If you look at the "dad's bike" issue throughout the whole of transcript A, you have a really meaty section on the effect of imitation and reinforcement that you can also link to Bruner, Vygotski, Lenneburg, Piaget and Roy.

    You need to get more terminology in by closely analysing the quotes - look at how she uses the filler "um" to give her time to consider a tactful way of answering him that doesn't quash his linguistic experimentation (overextension of the proper noun "Cartoon Network" to precisely identify what he is querying while knowing it was wrong - or he wouldn't be asking the interrogative) - or she might be trying to remember the name of the kind of design herself. Then she does use the negative particle "no" but perhaps only because he asked her directly (although contrast with "is dat your talker" to notice connections and contrasts). Explore to what degree it is negative reinforcement and how crucial it is for CLA to link back to the question and get more AO2 marks. Then link to other theories that could relate to this example.

    Proofread the last paragraph and check pitch vs tone. Also check what constitutes post-telegraphic (essentially adult language with very few accidental non-standard uses - explore the effect of gender and dialect on this).

    Some very good work here. Set targets from the feedback to ensure you practise hitting the high band AOs.

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