How far does Evie's Grandma's Language support Skinner's
Theory?
Introduction:
Skinner's Theory suggests this: that children acquire
language based on “behaviourist reinforcement” by linking meanings to words.
For example if a child says the word “Dog” and their mother smiles or behaves
positively then they will continue to link that word to the same meaning. I
expect to find evidence that supports this like if her Grandma praises her or
tells her "no" if she's done something wrong.
The data that I have collected are two transcript and are
from the same people, which makes it
reliable. The only difference is that they are talking about a different topic
and she's 5 months apart in age. This could influence it's reliability but I
will consider this in my evaluation. Also, the data was from 2004, which is
over a decade ago but I don't think that it would affect the analysis at all.
Analysis:
From looking at the two transcripts I can see that there are
a lot of positive behaviour reinforcement in the texts. The table below shows
the amount of positive and negative reinforcements.
|
Behaviour
Reinforcements:
|
Amount:
|
Does Evie
respond?
|
|
Transcript 1
|
|
|
|
Positive
|
11
|
11
|
|
Negative
|
1
|
1
|
|
Transcript 2
|
|
|
|
Positive
|
4
|
4
|
|
Negative
|
0
|
0
|
In the Table above Transcript 1 is the 'All the things'
transcript and Transcript 2 is the 'Castle' transcript.
In the transcripts, Evie doesn’t really reply to her
grandma's positive reinforcement however she didn't question it, so I counted
that in my quantifications as her responding because she didn’t seem confused
as to why her grandma was praising her.
I also counted her grandma repeating what Evie said as positive
reinforcement as she was reinforcing what Evie was saying as correct.
I find it interesting that Evie's grandma didn't use much
negative behaviour reinforcement.
In fact the only negative reinforcement that she used on Evie was telling her:
"go on then you find the bath (.) no not that
bath the house bath (4) oh yeah that’s it (.) who wants to go in the bath do
you think?"
However, this was only a
miscommunication and not really something that Evie did wrong. Something else
that I found interesting was how the Grandma recovered the negative
reinforcement. This is evidence that supports Skinner's theory about behaviour
reinforcement.
She also quickly changed from sort-of telling her
off to asking her a question that's linked to get her to talk. I think that
this is also evidence of child-led discourse which could also support Skinner's hypothesis that children's language
is influenced by the environment around them.
However, there is no way
that I could know whether it worked or not. This is because I have no other
data from later on in Evie's life that would show whether her Grandma's
language has affected her's.
Conclusion:
So, in conclusion, I think that my chosen theory supports my
data to an extent. The reason that I found what I found is because I had two transcripts
with the same people and so reliable data. I also think that I found it
limiting because I only had two instead of more
which could have helped me to either prove or disprove more clearly than
I did. In the future, I think I need more reliable data and so more data which
would improve my analysis and final conclusion.
