Stephen Fry's Planet Word

It was in North-East Africa where it is beloved that humans first evolved and so did language. Nouns, verbs and adjectives where born and so was the mystery of how children aged 2-5 learned to pick up language with quick skill, when we know now as adults how difficult it is to learn a new language. And it is the same everywhere around the world.

The different stages of development in a child's language learning are important to remember:

9 months - this is normally the beginning of the process where babbling starts to turn into phonemes like "ca", "ba and "ta". 

18 months - this I known as the first word stage as child begin to let language move their mouth more to create the words like "mummy" and "daddy".

2 years - the 2 word stage is where the child can begin to express language a bit more as they begin to gain higher semantically awareness but still need to word on structure. They seem to understand a lot more than what they can produce.

Up to the age of 3 - there is an increase in more linguistical language development and from then on language become easier and easier to acquire but it's still so complicated. Like what Skinner says about turn taking and how we seem to automatically know how to structure a conversation about who speaks forts and then second, keeping or flouting Grice's Maxims, even from a young age:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JmA2ClUvUY

So, how do we learn language and what's different between language and communication?

We know that animals can communicate but humans have become a sophisticated species to turn communication into language. Michael Thomas Eller, an evolutionary linguist, has manage to shows that animals are tied to their emotions to create noises like monkeys with little flexibility needed. However, better vocal appertaus like human is need to properly talk. Because of this, many different psychologist have tried to get apes and chimps to talk through the use of sign language, like Nim Chimpsky. This experiment showed us that they could never grasp the concept of using grammar in sentences but could sign simple nouns and verbs. They didn't have any linguistic creativity. Humans somehow had an revolutionary step, maybe the Fox-P-2 gene had something to do with it, but it is believed that we made this step in order to make it easer to collaborate to collect food and also something in the female DNA that need something like speech, to keep the tribes together to create a social cohesion for the children of the tribe. It was important to succeed so the children could grow up, keep pro-creating amd helping to pass knowledge across the generations. The main question being, did language changed us?

Language has now become and intellectual part of human nature and know 50-80% of the brain in involved in language. It all goes back to the nature vs nurture debate and how the forbidden experiment need some luck like the wild child called Victor to add evidence of the critical acquisition period. It shows that if we don't learn languge by the early puberty stage they we won't be able to use language at all. We might be able to pick up some nouns like Victor but won't be able to grammar to structure them. It tells us both nature and nurture is important as we are born the the DNA to speak but it needs to be stimulate by our environment to let it archive it's full potential. This can be linked back to Deborys research, showing how him and his wife as parents helped to develop their sons languge by stimulating him with positive responses so giving us a clue in how a child quickly develops their language.

An important peice of research to look at is from Professor Stephen Pinker. He looks how words in languge need to develop from the same linguistical environment. Context has become a significant part of how a child is going to learn from need certain words and how to associate them to the context e.g water, food, play, bed. It is also important to be creative with language for example with stories. From kinethtic to more narrative ones using rhyming couplets as a memory device as children aerial more like to remember the phonetics of the sentence rather than the words to begin with. Stories are also important as they are part of the bedtime routine that inspire children to have their own idea for stories and role play too. 

Another piece of important research tomorrow was done in 1958 by Jean Berko-Gleeson. It was called The Wug Test. In this test, the researcher would ask the child a question, "If this is a wug, what are they?", using visual aids to help and the determiner "they' to change the grammatical language. The child responded with "Wugs". Straight away, the child, even though it was a nonsense word, knew to add "s" to plauralise the word. The same with adding "ed" to make in a verb and "er" for past tense. The whole experiment supports Chomskys L.A.D, showing language is part of us from the very beginning and we know how to use it. This peice of research also shows the amount of language parents provide their children before they start school, around the age of 5, is crucial. Contextual factors around the home can affect this as you need active responses to develop communication. As shown by Labove, as he showed a change on context to pupils like teacher sitting eye to eye with them, made they engage in convertsaion more that if the teacher was standing over them. Showing that it looks like the couldn't access language but actually it was more to do with that they didn't want to. There is no eveidnce to show that actively coaching your child to speak can improve your child's ability to language anymore than if you don't.

So back to children in contextual settings, it maybe that children that go to nursery are more likely to learn possessive nouns more than if they don't because they are surrounded by lots of other children their own age and have to learn to share therefore picking up collaborative language also quicker. Also the role of genders is important to look at to as the role of the father has changed a lot. Once upon a time, they could have afforded not much contact with their child and mothers became the child's way of learning languge but now that is changing. Another little idea to think about is how a father tried to each his son to speak am different language to begin with but as soon as the son got more enfolded with his surrounding environment and realised other people didn't speak the language he was speaking, he dropped it. It stopped being the fun little game him and his father played and this was at the age of 3.

Sign language is also an interesting part if language to look at and it can be question is it actually a languge? However, people who sign maybe can't hear but they can communicate. It is a visual language and from a child's point of view, access to language through sight, face to face communication, is very important in the early stages of learning languge as it is visual before phonology. When talking about CLA, never dismiss visual importance on communication said the child to repetition to signify meaning for the representation of characterisation on words, people and places.

So overall in this episode by Fry, language never stays still. Change is definite and language is an important part that defines who we are!

To find out more about this documentary, follow this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015h1xb

The Frameworks and Spoken Language

Back to basicas - who remembers the frameworks! 

The features of spoken language 

Grice's Maxims - he beloved that co-operation was they key to conversations and that conversation followed 4 maxims:

Quantity - you shoul say no more than what is required unless expected

Relevance - saying relevant things in the conversation, otherwise the conversation is disrupted and will             not make sense 

Manner - speaking in a clear, orderly manner to avoid ambiguity 

Quantity - how to be truthful and not say anything false

If we break these maxims, it's called flouting them and conversations break down. We don't like it when people go on for too long, dominate, lie or refuse to acknowledge short on the conversation. Nut when it comes to children speaking, they flout these maxims all the time but that is good. It is showing their intelligence to follow and copy the rules of language even when it is not correct.

Another important feature of spoken language when it comes to children's languge is Hallidays functions of spoken language:

Recap on language and ...

So back to the AS stuff, let's beging with:

Language and Gender

All you need to remember is the 3Ds and the 2Cs. 

3Ds:

Deficit - this is about how women's language is less assertive like Janet Holmes (1984), found out more women use facilitative tags to show softening concer compared to men who are more likely to use medal tags to seek information

Domimce - how the mans language in a conversation likes to dominate like shown by Zimmerman and West (1975), show men are more likely to interrupt in a conversation.

Difference - comparing men and women's language in same or different sex conversations 

This can be linked to the 2Cs. This research is done by Deborah Tannen and Jenifer Coates: 

Competition - the adversarial style of a conversation, where the speakers vie for turns and where participants are more likely o contradict each other that build on each other's contributions. This is more likely to be a part of a mans conversation.

Co-operation - refers to a type on conversation where work together to produce share meanings. This is more likely to be linked to a what type of conversation women speak.

One more good linguist to remember is Robin Lakoff - the politeness principle and the theory of how women are mor likey to comply to the grammatical rules than men.

More theories and theorists below: 

Language and Power 

 

Remember the 2 Is: 

Instrumental - assertive power like rules and codes.

Influentail - persuasive power like advertising and speeches.

These two are important to think about for the context of CLA as parents want to use a mixture of both to assert power over their child. More instrumental through imperative sentences when they want to stop their children from doing something, but more influential power through intterogtive and declarative sentences. 

Other important theorists to know:

Brown and Levinson - how positive face = positive politeness and negative face = negative politeness, which the speaker can also use to be tactical as well.

Norman Fairclough - about how power is used behind and in the discourse, the use of synthetic personalisation to create a artificial relationship between the reciter and the producer, especially used in advertising/infulentail power.

This is good to think about when coming to language change.

Language and Technology 

This link here is to a very interesting article about who in the UK swears the most of twitter! This shows how language around the country is changing as some people are more strict with their language where other just freely say whatever they want!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29124416

What Youtube can show us about language!

There are many clips on YouTube that involve the older generation filming the younger one being cute with language, whether that is just starting to babble or go into the first or second word stages but it can be useful for data on how children improve and use language.

To start, this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKD6jzUxkek, which is a baby coping his Dad when he makes a "ahhhh" noise. This helps to show that from a young age, we as human know the idea of how turn taking works. Who speaks first, then who speaks next and so on. It also shows how we as parents respond to the level that our child is speaking, beginning to use pragmatics and explore the interactive nature of communication like this link of a child using lots of baby talk like babbling/non-verbal communication to talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13hRsyEbX4Q and how in this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZGi57Zl1Qk&feature=related, the child is just beginning to pick up certain softer vowel sounds to try and sing the words to happy birthday.

Gesturing and body language also becomes a great deal and it becomes easier to express what they want to say. This link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gSZfW4gVhI&feature=related shows a bit more extreme gesturing as this child at the age of 1 is using sign language to communicate but the parents is also responding to her child's correct sign in positive tones. This is important as it helps to motivate  the child to carry on to speak or gesture in this case, helping the child to want to pick it up quicker.

This is a good link to find out more detail: http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/lang-acq.cfm

Horizon - How do we speak??

So how do we speak? Horizon is a documentary program that aims to explore questions like this and its not specifically to do with children but the bases come from CLA - Child Language Acquisition. It discusses how we as humans are defined by are use of language to communicate and how speech and language defines us as a species. We are very sophisticated in our way on learning language as children can pick it up with minimal effort compared to adults and learn through a natural process and not being taught! However, this leads to the main debate in CLA. Do we learn it through nature or nurture? Are we born with the DNA coding to learn to speak or od it the environment around us that helps is to speak. How we learn to speak is even a mystery to the experts!

One expert in the field is Professor Deb Roy, a cognitive  scientist who wanted to see and hear how children learn to speak so his home became the lab, set up with camera and microphones as his son became the guinea pig. It became known as The Speech Home Project and up to the age of three, he filmed his son everyday learning to speak. The data saw his son go through the different stages of babbling, single word stage, two word stage and finally including more grammatical structure with the words. After going back through the data, he began to discover the way his wife and him were talking to their son affected how he learnt to talk. By positive responses and reinforcement, his son seemed to pick up language quicker. This is the same with all parents with kids. Simplifying their words and syntax and elongating words, which is known as convergence, shows they were doing it to be to be in the same level as the child. This is an example of parentese. Phonological awareness is how children begin to learn by listening to the tone, phonological features and intonation.  This lead onto longer sentences as the child developed and to the age of 5, a child will have learn over 5,000 words. Mainly verbs, nouns and determiners. All this research could lead us to see how words are born but at the moment, Deb Roys research is the clearest we have.

Human's are the only species that can convey complex meaning and thought through language, which makes us unique. Humans have tried to teach animals like the chimp Viki, however it didn't work as chimps have different vocal apparatus to us and there are certain brain processes that are stoping animals to speak. And also human can have this to shown in the case of Steve Speer. An accident cause him to have a stroke and has trouble recalling words. With the help of improved scanning, they managed to see what happened and how the damaged affected language response. More research looks into how babies only a day old could recognise its mothers voice showing we tune to the sound of speech and speech we recognise as soon as we are born. Another example that points to the fact we are born with the innate ability to speak is from a guy called Christopher, who is autistic and knows over 20 languages and has the ability to learn the languages quickly.

The Godfather of linguistics, Noam Chomsky theory is the basic of language is innate and easy though it looks complex for children to pick up. How the sentence structure, word order, meaning  and sound need to be learnt at an early age, which comes back to the nature/nurture debate.  The Forbidden experiment also come into this as they want to see if isolation of a child up to the age of 7 will make learning language difficult? Geni, wild child's and zebra finches experiment are the closet they have got to seeing if this affects learning of language and the zebra finch's showed that 3/4 generations after language could be learned again. However, due to the ethics this experiment with humans, it wouldn't be acceptable to do. Follow this link here to find out more about Geni: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hmdycJQi4QA

Chomsky's L.A.D is an important part of the nurture debate to why we can speak. He believes we are born with the blue print to have language that needs to be stimulated. This could be back up from the ground breaking recent research of the Fox-P-2 gene that was would to control out ability to speak in our DNA. This is evidence that we are born with ability to speak and support for L.A.D. However, Skinners Critical Acquisition Period can also use the gene ti show that you need both nurture and nature to develop language because even though you are born with this gene, it needs to be stimulated. There needs to be a connection between speech and cognitive learning. Origins and idea of language had been shown to develop unconsciously over time and there are many more factors that can effect language. When identified, all the components can show us how to be human.

To find this documentary, follow this link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=PZatrvNDOiE

Beginning the A2 course

Important link to the course specification, past papers and the frameworks:
http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/as-and-a-level/english-language-b-2705

This link is to David Crystals blog, which I belive is more useful than his website as it is more personal and link better to why he is so intrested in language:
http://david-crystal.blogspot.co.uk/

The Enlgish and Media magizine last eyar was very useful in producing vidoes, articles ect that had linguists speak about the different theories on technology, power and gender but also other useful topics aswell:
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/index.html

Analysis of the Railcard Advert

This text is a leaflet advertising a 16-25 railcard and trying to inform and persuade the audience of how it could be a good purchase. Even though the railcard can be brought from the ages of 16, I would say that the audience for this leaflet is aimed for the older audience or young adults who would be travelling a lot and maybe purchasing a railcard would be useful. The graphology of this whole leaflet plays a big part in the advertisng of the railcard as it is set ouw like a movie poster which straight away attracts the eye of the audience as this layout is eyecatching and uses the feautures of a movie poster to advertise their porduct. The images of the two charcters, boy and a girl, you can automtaically tell that they are sterotypes the representations of them. The girl looks young, attarctive, blonde and somone you would imgaine to be a star in a big movie who is longingly looking up for the handsome boy character, who is looking worried, which could be linked to the text about whether he can be the hero the auidnce expects him to be and save the girl. This links to the text of "He gets 1/3 off rail travel - but can he get her back?" as the rheotrical question also becomes a narriatve hook adding to the idea of the plot the movie senario the poster is trying to percieve. Its add to the persauive nature of the text as it helps to draw the auidnce in and get the idea of will he be the hero and get the girl back and whether the purchase of the railcard will also help this motive. The title "Saving Precious Penny" also helps to add to the whole punning of the movie theme the railcard advert is using as "Penny" can either be the girls name or actual money but the fact the adjective "Precious" can be used for both suggests that both is worth trying to achieve.

The text at the bottom of the leafet is like the small print of the movie poster as it is all capitalised but some words are bigger than others, which shows that the company has tried to keep the theme going on throughout the whole text. Its starts off with the imperative "Buy a 16-25 railcard" which makes it have a commanding tone towards the audience and therefore persauvie to go and buy one of these railcard. A personal pronoun "You" has also been used which gives the text a personal connection to the auidince so the auidnce feels like this text is directed at them and therefore useful item to purchase. Words like "Epic" have also been used in the small print which could be condsidered as film desriction specific lexis. This is imporant to keep the theme up but also how describing getting a railcard using film lexis which is used to persaude auidnces to go and watch this film can also be used to persaude the rail companies auidnce of 16-25 to buy a railcard. The whole movie theme is somthing this perticular age group can relate too and is cleverly used to be persauive for a different motive.