Tape-record at least five-ten minutes of interaction between a child (11-48 months of age) clearly in the stages of first language acquisition and an adult (not yourself). You can also search YouTube or other social media platforms for videos of children in conversation with an adult caregiver.
The child can be in conversation with another child or just alone with the adult for part of the transcript. Listen to the tape several times and transcribe the conversation word-for-word.
Highlight the parts of the recordings that are relevant to the points you wish to make about child language acquisition and caregiver speech.
Describe the stages of language acquisition as discussed in the readings. Identify and describe each stage. Discuss the language samples of child language acquisition that represent each stage. What characteristics of the stage does this data illustrate? Does the data differ? What are the differences?
Also discuss how the adult caregiver communicates with the child. What are the characteristics of caregiver speech and which of these characteristics, if any, are present in this adult’s interaction with the child?
Then, following the guidelines below, write a report of 300-500 words about the child’s language development, based on your tape-recorded data. What did you learn/confirm about first/child language acquisition? What does the data suggest? Does it concur with the stages as described in the readings? What conclusions can we make about the theories of first language acquisition based on these data? Include references to the readings.
Submit the report via Assignments.
Write-up
Literature Review
Review and summarize the articles/research/theory on first language acquisition and caregiver speech. Based on what you have read, state what you believe to be true about first language acquisition and caregiver speech. These are the assumptions that you are examining by collecting data.
Describe specific strategies you have read about that the adult uses to help the child’s language acquisition process (repeating child’s language; asking for information; answering questions; simplifying her/his own language; expanding child’s utterances). To review commonly used caregiver strategies, please refer to the readings and/or the video clips on language acquisition or caregiver speech, e.g., http://www.babyhearing.org/LanguageLearning/BuildConversations/Affirm.asp
Methodology/Research Design
Explain what you are going to do in this mini-study to explore your assumptions. That is, who are your participants, where did you collect the data, what did you do to collect the data, and any other relevant information.
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