Stages in child development

Cooling stage 

This occurs as early as 6 weeks and during this stage infants will begin to spontaneously make cooling sounds such as "aaaaa" and "oooo" at this stage children are learning to make sounds by manipulating their tongues, mouths and breathing. this behaviour happens when a child is alone and clearly indicates the child is experimenting with making sounds. At 8-20 weeks phonology allows the child to improve his/her voice control.

Babbling stage 

Babbling is a stage in child development in which an infant is experimenting with different utterings to articulate sounds but without any recognized words. Babbling begins shortly after birth and progresses as the infant gets older. They would begin to produce recognizable words after about 12 months though babbling may continue after that. there are 2 types of babbling , reduplicated babbling and variegated babbling.

Verbal scribbling

vocal play is the main event in the 20-30 week period. babies play with their voices changing pitch, loudness, rate and quality. as the baby discovers she/he can blow air through their lips you may hear raspberries and wet trills. Varied vowel like and consonant sounds including nasal sounds like mmm and nnn and fricatives fff are produced. the child also produces a range of sounds such as glides- low to high pitch and vice versa, to practice a variety of sounds. toward the end of the stage noises of consonants and sounds sound like they are together. 

Melodic utterance stage 

This stage occurs at 9-18 months and is the 4th stage of child language acquisition and is when the child starts to develop their skills in intonation, melody and rhythm. the child begins to understand the meaning of what theyre saying, however as they cannot properly talk they are often misunderstood by their parents, which fustrates the child.

Lexical and grammatical development   

Stage 1: holophrastic 

this occurs during the 12-18 month age range and the child utters their first word. they can build a vocabulary of holophrases- which can reach around 50 words. they are holophrases and not words because they convey all the meaning of a phrase/ sentence through language intonation and volume

stage 2: two word

this occurs at around 18 months and the child begins to use two words at a time. this can also be referred to 

language theories

Theories

 Theory 1: power 

This theory is relevant to my investigation because it will consist of various footballers being interviewed by the media post match and in this interview there will clearly be a more powerful participant and according to Fairclough there is instrumental and influential power and this can be determined by lexis such as formal, informal, slang, jargon etc. using fillers and how fluently their speech is can also be an indicator to who is the more dominant participant in the conversation. The dominant participant will generally set the agenda of the conversation, leads the talk, changes the topic freely, interrupt and overlap. the more submissive participant will respond rather than initiate,follow the set agenda and use fillers and be less confident.

Theory 2: politeness theory

This theory was made by Brown and Levinson and it includes elements such as face threatening acts which suggests that positive and negative face exist universally in human nature. facial expression are sometimes inevitable during conversations. An FTA  damages the face of the addressee or the speaker by acting differently to the others wants. An FTA can either be positive or negative. A negative FTA is when an individual doesn't try to avoid an obstruction in the conversation, this can affect the reader or the hearer. A positive FTA is when the speaker or hearer doesn't care about the speakers feelings,wants and needs. this can also have an affect on the hearer/reader.

Theory 3: 3 different types of power:

Wareings'  research suggested that there are 3 different types of power. these are: social group, personal and political. this could be useful to my investigation as in the dialect this theory could suggest what type of power each participant hold in the conversation.

 

coursework sources for A2

Sources

http://www.skysports.com/football/

http://www.skysports.com/football/news/11890/9978251/bayern-munich-rejected-offer-for-thomas-muller-says-president

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/34148777

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/34149597

http://www.skysports.com/football/news/11863/9978327/mario-balotelli-scores-on-second-debut-for-ac-milan-in-friendly-win

http://www.skysports.com/watch/video/sports/football

Transcript Analysis

the transcript that I analysed was on the TV show the apprentice. the transcript consists of Lord Alan sugar and one of the aspiring apprentices - Clare. it is clear that when reading this transcript  there is an unequal encounter between the pair. For example, Clare says "Sir Alan may I say one more thing please." the uses of the words "may" and "please" show that she needs to ask permission for Sugar to speak again and this clearly shows that he has some sort of authority over her. This links to power theory and how power is used in all different elements of language

if you were to use this data in an investigation you could possibly try and compare it with other transcripts from the apprentice and analyse how different candidates react and approach sugar in different ways. you could add up all different elements of their speech and perhaps see how sugar approaches different candidates whether it be gender or any other factors.

Investigating Language on Twitter

Introduction

we set out a hypothesis that men are more dominant as they are more straight to the point whereas women tend to waffle which links to the deficit which is a power theory. we planned on using one man and one women who were both in the public eye, these were Ed Milliband- an MP and former leader of the labour party, and Amy Childs - a reality TV star

Methodology

our methodology was two pick every third tweet from each of these people. We chose to do it this way to prove that there are no anomalies. we then proceeded to count the number of each various feature of each tweet to try and prove our hypothesis.

Analysis

The results are as follows:

• Emoji's men used 0 and women used 12
• Emotive language men used 13 and women used 7
• Men's sentence lengths ranged for men at 16-27 with an average of 20.1. Women on the other hand had a range of 3-17 with an overall average of 9.2
• Amount of hashtags used by men is 1 and women was 10

we have ultimately found out that our findings do not support our hypothesis. this could primarily be because of the choice of the people in which we chose to analyse . Ed Milliband is a politician and Amy Childs is a reality TV star. This shows that these two are from very different backgrounds and therefore it is unlikely that they can be compared in this way and be a general stereo-type   of each of their gender groups.

Conclusion

Reflecting on this study I think its clear that we may have chosen the wrong subjects for this investigation. If this this investigation were to be done again we could choose people from different similar backgrounds because if we did this the two people would be easier to compare and hopefully give us more conclusive evidence for our hypothesis.

Gender Theories

Dominance theory

the theory that in mixed sex conversations men are more likely to interrupt women then men are to interrupt women. recorded by Don Zimmerman and Candace West. The participants in the study were all white and middle class.

Status and support

Men are grown into a world where a conversation is a competition and therefore try to gain the upper hand in a conversation and try to dominate them. Women however women tend to use conversation for conformation and support of their ideas according to Deborah Tannen.

Report talk and rapport talk

According to Deborah Tannen the distinction of information and feelings is also described as report talk (men) and rapport talk (women)

Men:

• Get more air time
• Speak in public
• Negotiate status/avoid failure
• Speak one at a time
• Speak asymmetrically  

Women:

• Talk too much
• Speak in private contexts
• Build relations
• Overlap
• Speak symmetrically

H/W 24th Feb

texts A,B,C,D and E all have elements of persuasion to them however they all have secondary purposes to them and some of them are stronger inclusions than others. text A is an advert for head and shoulders hair strengthening tonic. in bigger letters than the rest of the advert it says "supercharge your hair." the word "supercharge" is a use of a auxiliary verb as it is in a way trying to make you buy this product and by using these sort of verbs it makes the product feel more appealing to the person reading the advert. a quote also given on the advert from a user of the product, it says "I have been using this product for over a week now and I am already amazed by the results." next to this quote is 5 stars. this is another use of persuasion as by using a quote from somebody who has used the product it will perhaps make the product feel more effective and trustworthy. text B is also an advert from a magazine however instead this is for a pair of adidas football boots. there is a quote on the bottom of the advert in big bold writing saying "start your legend." this as does text A uses an Auxiliary verb in "start." Instead of using a quote from a user they use the name of footballer Lionel Messi in the title of their product. Messi is considered one of if not the best footballer so by using his name this could persuade people to buy these boots as the prestigious name in the title may convince people that this is a good product and this will persuade them to buy them. Text C is from the back of a Special K bar. It says "savour each deliciously smooth and chewy chocolate bite." the two previous texts this also uses an auxiliary verb to help persuade people. However as this is on the back of the packet the purpose of this perhaps isn't sell the product as most people wouldn't look at the back of a product before they buy it. so instead of being to persuade a person to buy the product this could instead be to inform people on how to enjoy eating this product in the best way. Text D is a slightly weaker inclusion than the others as it has no real element of trying to sell a product. This text is a letter from the NUT about striking. like the others it uses an auxiliary verb by saying "please strike on 17 October 2013." this is not trying to get people to buy a product but to help a cause. so instead of using more appealing vocabulary such as "savour" it just plainly gets straight to the point by saying "please." Text E is the weakest inclusion in all the texts. it is an extract from and instant messaging conversation. an example of when persuasion is used is A: I didn't meet him but someone else did and its kinda a funny story B:TELL ME. this is different in the sense that doesn't appear that person A needs much persuading as she wouldn't have mentioned the scenario which occurred if she wasn't going to tell person B what happened and it is in a much different format to the other texts.