Mini investigation:
Hypothesis:
Positive reinforcement will have a positive effect on the behaviour
of the child, centred on Skinner's theory ‘Operant Conditioning’.
Introduction:
I have chosen to explore child directed speech and how this
affects the child. My data has come from the ‘All the things’ video, where Evie’s
Grandmother constantly rewards Evie’s with positive reinforcement. The
transcript for the video lasts for 2 minutes and I will use this data to
support my hypothesis as well as collecting data that contradicts with my
hypothesis to compare with.
PEE Paragraph:
Some of the evidence that I have found supports my hypothesis, for example:
E that nice
G that’s lovely
E (inaudible) …smile
G it is nice smiling (.) hahaha
E I smile
G you are sm-
E (inaudible)
G ah you’re smiling a nice smile (.) now who else shall we get from this house?
In this sample the grandmother is providing Evie with positive reinforcement and Evie searching for praise after receiving some she continues to smile, Evie keeps saying "smile" which makes her grandmother laugh. By carrying on smiling most likely due to the comments and the reaction she is receiving, Evie then ignores her grandmothers attempt to change the topic by asking her Evie a question and continues to smile "hahaha that's a lovely smile (.) right now what else shall we do?", because of the grandmothers reaction of praise and laughter. She then repeats this hoping to receive more praise from her grandmother, she repeats this a further four times. Only 9% of the grandmothers language is interrogatives, she is taking cues from Evie and is questioning them, only a small amount of her language is actually telling Evie what to do, Evie mainly chooses what she does depending on the reaction she receives.
E picture [pɪʧɘ] of me
G yeah it is a picture of you (.) hahaha that’s a lovely smile (.) right now what else shall we do?E that nice
G that’s lovely
E (inaudible) …smile
G it is nice smiling (.) hahaha
E I smile
G you are sm-
E (inaudible)
G ah you’re smiling a nice smile (.) now who else shall we get from this house?
In this sample the grandmother is providing Evie with positive reinforcement and Evie searching for praise after receiving some she continues to smile, Evie keeps saying "smile" which makes her grandmother laugh. By carrying on smiling most likely due to the comments and the reaction she is receiving, Evie then ignores her grandmothers attempt to change the topic by asking her Evie a question and continues to smile "hahaha that's a lovely smile (.) right now what else shall we do?", because of the grandmothers reaction of praise and laughter. She then repeats this hoping to receive more praise from her grandmother, she repeats this a further four times. Only 9% of the grandmothers language is interrogatives, she is taking cues from Evie and is questioning them, only a small amount of her language is actually telling Evie what to do, Evie mainly chooses what she does depending on the reaction she receives.
Analysis:
My data is unreliable as I only have data from child, this
means that I can’t compare how other parents or carers speak to their children
and only how Evie’s Grandmother speaks to her. This gives me little context and
comparability data beyond the recordings of the participations relationship.
Conclusion and Evaluation:
After looking at my data, my hypothesis is correct, when
Evie is being rewarded for her positive behaviour we can see she repeats it as
she wants more praise from her grandmother (when smiling).However, there are
many limitations to my investigation, one being how Evie’s behaviour has
already been affected by her parents and we don’t know how the Grandmother has
affected the language (especially if the grandmothers language is different from
her parents). As well as, isn’t the lack of data I had to begin with and then
the limiting comparability data that I have overall. Also there may have been
the observes paradox where Evie possibly controlled what she said and stopped
herself from saying/doing what she wanted.
A clear and well-focussed piece so make sure you carry that clarity through to your investigation. It would be useful to find more than one incidence of positive reinforcement to compare so that you could see more clearly how it fits into the power dynamic of their relationship - I asked you to use more than one transcript.The fact that we are focussed on behaviour rather than language developemnt means this is limited in terms of how much language analysis you can do and that would limit your grade, so always choose ideas that will allow you to use the maximum amount of terminology and imaginative contextual interpretation, as well as the clear link to theory that you have here.
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