Analysing Zach transcripts

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.