In
the Banana transcript, Halla sets the agenda the majority of time, asking
frequent interrogatives such as 'What are you doing now'? Despite setting the
agenda frequently which shows her power in discourse potentially due to her
power (social group) for being the older participant, the total of 30
interrogatives asked in fact shows her co-operation and rapport style to
include Zach in the conversation and prompt him to do the majority of speaking
to enhance his learning and vocabulary, suggested by Tannen and the female
'genderlect' of a rapport style. Halla also asks 10 open interrogatives which
allows Zach to take centre stage in the conversation and have the majority of
air time; in the Robot transcript Halla only asks 7 open questions which would
assume Zach had less air time and a lower mean length of utterance. However,
Zach had a mean length of utterance of 7.5 in the robot transcript compared to
5.4 in the banana transcript. This could be because Zach is over a year older
in the robot transcript suggesting his speech and vocabulary has improved,
although the reason of a higher MLU in the robot transcript could be because a
a high number of closed questions were asked in the banana transcript (15),
considerably more than in the robot transcript (4) which would essentially
lower the MLU due to shorter answers needing to be required. Jerome Bruner's
theory of child directed speech is also supported in the banana transcript due
to 5 repeats/ prompts made by Halla to encourage Zach to speak and the fact that
Halla pursued Zach's topic of interest throughout to keep them engaged, coming
from the pragmatics and grammar sections of his theory. The prompts/repeats
also support Skinner's theory of positive reinforcement to encourage a child's
learning by praising and responding to a young learning child.
In the banana
transcript Halla echoes Zach's non-standard uses on two separate occasions e.g.
'are the skins off are they?'; this may be because Halla wants to encourage
Zach to keep speaking and not disrupt his confidence by negatively reinforcing
his mistake of over-generalisation, instead using positive reinforcement by
repeating and responding to what he said, again supporting Skinner's theory of
operant conditioning to encourage a childs development. This over-generalisation
also supports Chomskys theory that children have a sense of grammar which has
been 'hard wired' into the brain due to Zach using the non-standard use which
he has potentially never heard before - this virtuous error does show an
understanding of language. Despite echoing the non-standard use of 'skins' and
the improper syntax of 'I think I don't', Halla does use the effect of
modelling as well when Zach mistakes bolognaise for bolognay to encourage Zach
to use the adult form of the word, again showing positive reinforcement. This
effect is shown due to the robot transcript a year later having no non-standard
uses apart from the improper syntax ‘waiting to get better for it’ which
included a reformulation suggesting he knew what he was going to say in the
first instance was wrong so tried to correct it, and after Halla says the
proper syntax of ‘waiting for the robot to get better?’ he quickly interrupts
saying ‘yes yes’- this interruption and 2 other interruptions from the banana
conversation show support of the dominance theory that males interrupt more
than females; however the interruptions could be because of the context of Zach
getting something wrong and then quickly wanting to show Halla that he does
understand the word order – apart from this, the correct syntax is used
throughout both transcripts, showing support for Chomsky’s theory that children
do have an understanding of syntax before they are properly taught it.
Using
simple sentences in the majority of sentences in the banana transcript, it
seems that Zach had improved his vocabulary and ability over the course of the
year in between transcripts due to using multiple compound sentences in the
robot transcript using frequent coordinating conjunctions such as ‘so’. Despite
this there were a lot more pauses in the robot transcript and in particular in
the longer utterances, potentially showing that he was struggling during the
long utterances. However this influent speech may be because of his illness
during the time.
Because
of the illness occurring during the robot transcript which impacted on the
fluency of his speech, the data could be unreliable when drawing conclusions.
However, the illness didn’t have a substantial impact which consequently
impacted on his vocabulary as he used more compound sentences and had a higher MLU
compared to the previous conversation. Overall the transcripts do support
Chomsky’s theory of children having an understanding of syntax due to Zach
using the correct syntax throughout both transcripts for all but two times, one
for each transcript, one of which he tried correcting at the start and hastily
replied to the modelled version of what Halla described, and also supports
Chomskys theory due to Zach saying improper uses of language that he has never
heard before such as ‘skins’, where this virtual error shows a natural
understanding of language use. Skinners theory that development of language is
mostly due to positive reinforcement is also supported due to Halla responding
to both proper and improper uses of language from Zach and consequently caused
his MLU to increase.
