A 2000 word essay for the 'Developmental Psychology' module of 2nd year psychology.
Answering the question: 'Using psychological evidence, critically evaluate the importance of social interaction to children's development of language'.
Reference list included.
Using psychological evidence, critically evaluate the importance of social
interaction to children's development of language.
This essay looks at the importance of social interaction in the development of
language in children. There have been many theories have been formulated on how such
happens with ones being regarded as more than important than others. For the development
of language social interaction has been suggested to play a key role thus having significant
importance when it comes to language development. Ideas for this come from many
theorists one such being Jerome Bruner (1974) who shows the importance of social
interaction in a socio-cultural approach.
The socio-cultural approach emphasises the importance of how social interactions
help a child develop language from parents as well as others immediately around said child.
Ideas such as child directed speech and language acquisition support systems (LASS) are
the main methods that are used to explain to how such happens. Child directed speech
refers to people (parents of the child) speaking to the child in ‘baby talk’ or ‘motherese’
(Snow, 1972), this form of communication involves simplified words that are spoken in high
pitched tones with exaggerated modulations (Hoff, 2003). A study from Hoff and Tian (2005)
looked at the socioeconomic and cultural effects on language development using two
different studies one looking at Americans and the other looking at Chinese participants. The
American study conducted by Bornstein (2002) on the topic suggests that the use of the
speech patterns such as described are beneficial to a child’s development. The findings
showed that the children with mothers that spoke with more questions and whose speech
was more in a ‘motherese’ tone were able to produce more spontaneous speech with a
much greater variation in word types. This study also found that the mothers from higher
economical background were more likely to use the ‘motherese’ speech which suggests a
cultural-economic influence to parenting and therefore an impact on child speech
, PSYC2093 Developmental Assessment
development. Overall the study shows to how the social influence of a mother using a wider
and more simple vocabulary with frequent question asking can lead to a child to developing
speech but also developing a higher level of speech with a wider range of vocabulary thus
demonstrating to how social interaction plays an important role in the development in speech
within children.
The other study that was looked at, was conducted by Erbaugh (1992); this was
conducted in a similar manor as the Bornstein study but used a Chinese sample as
participants. The findings from this study were that the Chinese parents used question-style
communication where the adult continued to ask questions until a child gave the desired
answer. This study also found greater emphasis on the idea of children imitating adults with
speech, this further displaying the importance of social interaction in speech development.
Similarly, to the American study it was also found that the Chinese parents of the higher
socioeconomic status spoke more to their children with the wider range of vocabulary. This
further demonstrates to how the social interaction between speaking adults and children
furthers language development in a child learning the ability of speech.
There are other perspectives that explain to how language develops, one being the
behaviourist perspective. This highlights the importance of social interaction as it
emphasises that imitation is the way in which language develops. Bloom et al (1972)
demonstrated such as out of the 6 children that were studied all imitated their mothers which
was reflected in the improvements, they made in lexical and grammatical variation but also
that all 6 shared the same tendency to imitate language. This shows that there is great need
for imitation for children to develop language as the imitation allows for extensive growth in
the variation of vocabulary and the ability to use such to communicate socially. However,
from this there is also enough to suggest that the use of spontaneous speech plays a fairly
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