Week 3: Reflection assignment

Posted byprofessorkatherinemoralesPosted inUncategorized

TOPIC: LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION

Blogging / Interactive reflection (BLOG) (20%)

  • In this section you will write a 300-500 word reaction segment to each week’s material. You may talk about: (1) what you found interesting in the material covered that week and why, (2) what you found challenging, (3) how it ties to your research interests, (4) whether you’ve read related material, (5) whether it reminds you of real life situations, etc.
  • (Or) You may submit a ‘linguistic artifact’ or interesting piece of linguistic evidence (this may be an image, a YouTube video, a news article on a language-related issue) that you feel relates to the classroom material as part of your weekly reflection. Along with this artifact, you are expected to provide a description on why you believe that artifact ties to discussed material.

Reflection pieces are to be left in the “comment section” below, including your full name and word count. Please make one entry [no duplicates].  The deadline for each weekly assignment is Saturday at 5:00pm of that week.

24 thoughts on “Week 3: Reflection assignment”

  2. This week’s reading was very interesting! I had never really thought about how speaking to children will affect the way they learn the language. When taking intro to linguistics and other linguistic classes we had talked about how babies learn and we had mentioned that they are born with the set of rules for any language, so I found it extremely interesting. That’s why I never really took into consideration how we should speak to the child because by just hearing us they will learn and pick up on our specific ways of speech and rules of the language. After reading the text “Language acquisition and socialization”, seeing the example of the case of Bage, the child from Papua New Guinea and the example the Professor provided in class about her niece, I believe that when communicating between children, it might be faster and easier for the child to acquire the language. Because having someone close to your age can be relatable and the child would want to imitate the other infant. The other interesting point that I would like to mention is the fact that probably the two children described in the reading learned their languages equally as good or as correct. I would be interested in seeing a study on that. On how children taught in a baby voice and an adult voice differ when growing, like sentence structure or even the formal or informal speech that we discussed in class. Learning language nowadays as I had mentioned in class, kids might be learning with their phones and technology so I did some research and found a video, not sure how old it is about a woman explaining how they did studies in which kids learned language with other adults reading books and all of that while others watched videos of the same thing, but the kids that watched the videos showed no progress at all. I have no idea how old this study, although the interview was aired on 2009, but the research I’m interested in doing focuses on how young Puerto Rican children might learn language through videogames or videos. My little cousin has shown great progress in his English and speaking skills using his tablet to play games and watch videos. I couldn’t be there 24/7 when he was learning language, but I do notice that he has more knowledge in speaking English than his older siblings.

    here is the link to the video: https://youtu.be/EKI5886xbBA

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  3. According to linguistic anthropologist maintaining a social interaction play a crucial role in language acquisition, it means “language socialization”, the process of acquiring language is deeply affected by the process of becoming a competent member of society (Ochs & Schieffelin: 2001:264). This picture is accurate to the previous quote, because as we could see agents of socialization are in other words what makes a competent person in the eyes of society: Family, religion, values, beliefs, customs, social settings, grammar, language acquisition, behavior, etc. As it is set in the book, it is quite difficult for a child to learn a language without also becoming socialized into a particular culture or social group and the development of these agents became an important process in a person’s language acquisition. https://images.app.goo.gl/BLyAtHv7Go6ZwrbC7

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    2. According to linguistic anthropologist maintaining a social interaction play a crucial role in language acquisition, it means “language socialization”, the process of acquiring language is deeply affected by the process of becoming a competent member of society (Ochs & Schieffelin: 2001:264). This picture is accurate to the previous quote, because as we could see agents of socialization are in other words what makes a competent person in the eyes of society: Family, religion, values, beliefs, customs, social settings, grammar, language acquisition, behavior, etc. As it is set in the book, it is quite difficult for a child to learn a language without also becoming socialized into a particular culture or social group and the development of these agents became an important process in a person’s language acquisition.
      Ochs and Schieffelin argued that “what a child says and how he or she says it, will be influenced by local and cultural processes” at the same time these authors defined two claims that states or affirm their perspective or point of view about acquisition and socialization. One of the claims refers that “the process of becoming a competent member of society is realized to a large extent through language, by acquiring knowledge of its function social distribution and interpretations in and across socially defined situation” (Ochs & Schieffelin: 2001:277).
      To understand the link between language and culture, many times is required to think about how my behavior would be if I speak a different language. Personality is one of the fields that are related to language diversity unified with social and cultural context but in the case of a child who is learning and acquiring a language, many time their background or just their reference of language acquisition is based on the caregiver, which play an important role in children language acquisition. It is shown many examples during the book that provided us plenty of ideas about the different ways that caregivers take care of language acquisition for a baby. These caregivers are influenced also by context, the way that the people that surround them practice language with children, what returns us to the agents of socialization, and caregivers implicitly are one of the most important agents that a child has to socialize a language

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  4. There are a lot of directions I can follow when talking about socialization in language, but for the sake of this blog I will stick to the Impact of socialization and environment in bilingual or multilingual language learning and timeline. I don’t dispute the innate component of language acquisition in humans and I acknowledge that there are some similarities on the time people seems to learn certain things. However, it is not by any means universal. Under normal circumstances, a child has the ability of mastering a language or languages he or she has been exposed to. This doesn’t mean that the child will learn by just receiving input. There will be numerous differences on the level of competence, vocabulary used, timeline of learning or even whether a language is retained at all based on the social environment that the child is raised. As an example, I present to you my father. Married five times, he had children in three different marriages. My bother and I came first, we were both exposed to English and Spanish but due to my father strong ideology views against English and the United States, our learning process slowed down. I wasn’t until my parents divorced and we started living with our mother, who don’t share my father views, that differences in our English learning speed and specially vocabulary started to notice. My father quickly remarried and had two more children who shared the same age difference as my brother and me. The results were almost identical, the only exception was the speed of English acquisition, because while my father had the same ideology, English was becoming more and more popular so there were a lot of factors even he couldn’t control such as music, television and the beginning of social media in and outside the house. At the same time my father was in her second marriage, my mother had a daughter and here’s where the difference in learning is hugely noticed. My sister didn’t have a father figure and since my mother don’t share my father views, suddenly English was not only okay, it was encouraged. My sister and I went to the same school, and we were taught surprisingly by most of the same teachers even though there is a considerable time lap. The speed, the fluency and the vocabulary in which she learned was astonishing. It wasn’t until my university studies as an adult where I forced my self to improve that I could make up for some deficiencies and to this day I am not as fluent speaker and my younger sister. Yes, I was able to acquire both English and Spanish because I did receive input since childhood. However, even after being part of the same family, living in the same town, going to the same school, learning from the same teachers there are very noticeable differences in how I became a competent member of society through the language that was deem correct for me to use. This raise a lot of “What if?” questions none bigger than is there an ideal social environment that would help maximize language learning without limits on people?

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  5. Ahaern’s chapter and the study by Ochs and Schieffelin bring really interesting data to light about how language socialization affects short and longterm linguistic phenomena. It was intriguing to see how the different examples of socialization of infants caused them to learn certain linguistic factors at different rates, depending on if the culture calls, or doesn’t use, for the use of “self-lowering” or “child-raising”. Along with these, the use of motherese is an interesting phenomenon.

    Motherese, seemingly, doesn’t affect language acquisition, positively or negatively, because although its a part of socialization from the part of close family members, it is not the only stimuli the child gets. I remember wondering once, since the argument I had heard for that theory is that the child hears others speaking in a standard manner it does not pick up motherese as part of their dialect, what would happen if there was a scenario where all the child would hear is motherese. There is really no way to observe such a case, as it would be obviously not ethical, but would it make a difference if all the child heard from their surroundings were consistent strings of motherese.

    On another hand, language socialization and acquisition gets me thinking a lot on the case of Puerto Rico. I have heard of many cases, myself included, where the child started learning English through television (children’s cartoon shows). I cannot vouch for the experience of others but in my household, both parents have a good understanding of English but would never use it in conversation. My only exposures to it were the television and possibly some songs, but as a child, before entering school I was raised by my mother so I did not have contact with consistent English speakers. However, according to my parents, I started speaking it on my own, not just repeating what I had heard but making creative sentences about our surroundings. Herein lies my question, is the bilingual nature of Puerto Rico enough to push a child to start speaking English, if there is no stimulus from their caretakers? Is the television enough to begin the acquisition of a new language for an infant? I remember reading an excerpt of an older study stating that children of deaf families would not learn spoken language just through the radio, possibly due to lack of interaction (I cannot find the paper at the moment when I do I will link it) does that same logic transfer to tv? Or does the amount of interactive children shows on television (Dora, SuperWhy, etc.) become a workaround to the lack of human interaction that media has? These thoughts have piqued my curiosity for a while, it would be quite entertaining to read a study on something like this, or maybe in the future conduct one of my own.

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  6. Ochs and Schieffelin’s chapter on language socialization and acquisition shows a lot of different data in regards to how children acquire language differently and at different speeds. The world is a large place and as such it is full of different people with different cultures and views of raising a child. These differences means that depending on the culture the children are brought up in, their acquisition of language may be faster than others or they might learn certain linguistic features before. Depending on the necessity of the culture they are being raised in the child will, while learning the language, also learn to be a part of its culture’s society.

    This chapter shows how different aspects of life, such as ethnographic features, can influence the way people teach children language and how these children acquire that language or languages. One of the aspects that has always drawn me to sociolinguistics is the differences in language acquisition and how culture plays into that. I’ve always thought about how being Puerto Rican and learning English in Puerto Rico was different that learning English in another part of the world. In my household, Spanish and English were learned simultaneously and in my mind, English and Spanish are my native languages. I live in a predominantly Spanish speaking country but because of my mom, who was raised in the US, English was spoken just as much as Spanish. My language acquisition environment was the same as my older sibling’s and yet my grasp of the English language is considered better than theirs from an early age. My older brothers would not consider English their native language and they don’t generally speak it in normal conversation while my speech mostly consists of English and Spanish interwoven. I think part of the reason I learned English as well as I learned Spanish had to do with a lot of my family having been raised in the US. I think because English was not seen as the language of the colonizers, or any of the other language ideologies Puerto Rican’s have of English, I was able to pick it up as easily and as simultaneously as Spanish. All of these differences in language acquisition in my own family have made research such as Ochs and Schieffelin’s, interesting to me.

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  7. After reading primarily “Language Acquisition and Socialization” by Laura Aheam and “Language Acquisition and Socialization” by Elinor Ochs and Bambi B. Schieffelin is relatable the fact of how interaction (communication) varies according to the place, culture and ideologies of an individual. Also, would this apply to writing? Because as you know writing is also a form of communication and depending to whom are you directing the information is the way of formality that you will develop the context. This is why we have different levels of speech dialogue regarding the construction of sentences. Not only we can see this example by comparing one country from the West to one from the East. You may even take for example Puerto Rico by comparing one city from each corner and by just paying attention of their informal and formal speeches you can hypothesize their economic status (level) and also people’s beliefs. Or as simple as comparing one person from the rural area from one of the urban area. There is typically a characteristic that individuals can perceive in matter of no time such as their repertoire. The way an individual speaks for “x” occasion is not the same for “y” and even their lexicon may have a slight change. Example: “empanadilla” “pastelillo”, Idiomatic Expressions may have other meanings.

    Even though I am focusing on COMPS it could be possible to attach to the linguistic area a topic such as: How social levels (in terms for communication) may interfere with the understanding of material in the classroom? Since the way we were raise does have a change to our daily inputs, students may struggle with the application of the material in the classroom and outside of it. A person that does not have resources nor is in an atmosphere constantly practicing their second language might have less fluency and understanding of new data than one who has these resources. Maybe the person will not be able to search for clue words because they have not developed a wide amount of words for their lexicon, thereby, they cannot understand the context of the information that is being given. Is interesting how ideologies but also experience in life does influence an individual’s way of speaking and how to they are capable of applying new concepts according to new circumstances.

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  8. Something interesting from this week’s reading on Language Socialization was on the different ideologies that cultures when it comes to learning a language. In the Ochs and Schieffelin (2001), they present three distinct developmental stories on how they believe language is acquired in infants. The first example is of a white middle-class Anglo-American family. After the infant is born, mothers hold their child in a way where they are facing each other. The middle class also tends to involve the child in interaction by dumbing the vocabulary or baby talk. What interested me was that “vocalizing and physical movement are often interpreted as meaningful” (Ochs & Schieffelin: 2001) ). This is completely opposite to the second developmental story presented from the Kaluli people from Papa New Guinea. This population does not address infants the same way Anglo-American middle class do. They describe their babies as taiyo (soft) and ‘they have no understanding’. Because the Kaluli people believe that the use of language is in means to “control, manipulate, expression, assertion and appeal” they have the obligation take care of infants because they feel sorry for them for not being able to do any of these. Opposite to Anglo-American middle-class mother, the Kaluli mothers do not face their children when vocalizing to them. Nor do they pay attention to utterances made by the children. That is to say, they do not involve the children in any interaction with the mother. Only when the infant begins to craw and interact with other children when begins to crawl and engage in activities. Language is not recognized in the Kaluli society until the words mother and breast are used. We might think this to be a little harsh to believe that infants are only recognized of acquiring a language when using critical words such as mother and breast, however, our society also does the same thing. From the beginning parents “fight” to see if the infants first words are either mama (mother) or dada (father). And it isn’t until these two words are said that, although not directly said, children are recognized as learning a language. (354 words)

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  9. The most interesting factor in language socialization, for me, is the cultural background that sets these infants apart from, for ex. the white middle class community. The chapter provides specific data on child language acquisition and how there are certain cultural factors that pre-determine the way they acquire the language. While reading the chapter and having experienced the cultural differences that set apart language acquisition in children, I can’t help but to think mostly about nature vs nurture. Evidently, both nature and nurture influence and play a crucial role on the acquisition of a language, however, according to B.F Skinner, language is acquired through conditioning in contrast to Chomsky’s UG; meaning children tend to acquire languages better through imitation and especially reinforcement. Most of Skinner’s ideas are based on the fact that children are influenced socially and learn through social interaction, Repetition, and association (associate words with people, events, objetcs…). Because children tend to learn through imitation and social interaction, we can say the nurture phenomena is habit forming. But if children learn to speak by imitating adults, how do we explain a child’s natural acquirement of grammar and syntax? In order for correctness to occur there must be some type of stimuli from the societal factor that reinforces correct grammar etc. But if we leave it all to nurture, we can’t explain how children develop language nor how they acquire a proper grammatical construct.
    In our society, we do tend to dumb down our speech in a way we believe will serve as a facilitator for our children’s ‘repertoire.’ However, in my household, my mother is an American elementary English teacher, so our raising, and my cousin’s raising, was built around her already pre-existing knowledge of language acquisition. Vygotsky acknowledges language acquisition in between people of distinct cultures. The fact that my mother is an English teacher in our white middle class western culture does influence the way I and my family members acquire languages. Although we belong to the same cultural frame, my mother was taught certain cons regarding motherese/parentese so we all were spoken to without having things dumbed down. Because I am also a babysitter, when I babysit the 1 year old and 4 year old, I refrain from also using motherese; however, there is an emotional attachment to the children and sometimes I tend to baby talk without really noticing it.

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  10. Language acquisition is crucial to become a “competent” member of society. This process is carried out in many different ways according to the traditions, culture, beliefs and stratification of each society. I found interesting, how the role of the child in his/her own process of acquiring the first language varies in different communities.
    In western culture, the child has a protagonist role, and the adult is supposed to provide the possible sources of learning to him/her. On the other hand, some eastern societies, as the Kalulis, see the child as the one responsible of his/her expression. Something similar happens in Samoan society, where the child carries the burden of clarifying what he/she wants to express.
    The “baby talk” that we, as westerners, know and use, it is still being debated. Some theories claim that baby talk can slow the process of acquiring “real grammar and words”. Others affirm that children are more receptive to high pitched pronunciation and exaggerated intonation, common traits of this practice, and this receptiveness allows them to develop cognitive skills. However, there are other studies that propose a combination of both methods. According to this perspective, adults should use accurate and articulated pronunciation and pay attention to intonation while they are communicating with children. In this way, children will be focused on the speech and aware of how to pronounce words.
    In Samoan and kaluli communities, this process is supposed to be developed along with child´s independence. It is the child who needs to express his/her thoughts, hence he or she must find a way. How the child transmits needs, ideas or feeling to others, it is also attached to strict social rules and classifications that determine the way of living. The process that the child must carries out can be seen as “cruel” for us, western people. Not to guide a child to learn something as important as language, is an unconceivable idea for societies like ours.
    I personally think on these scenarios as opportunities. Every culture has its own way and it is important not to judge this processes as right or wrong. Instead, we should see these differences as possibilities to understand the complex process of language acquisition from other perspectives.
    Laura Buitrago G.

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  11. Och’s and Schieffelin’s chapter on “Language acquisition and socialization” demonstrate us with a variety of data regarding communicative development through socialization. The third example given in the chapter is about a white middle-class caregiver describing and affirming what emotional and physical expressions their child is doing. In the text, they use Lock (1981), Ryan (1974) and Shotter (1978) conclusion “the mother, in interpreting and infant’s behaviors, provides meanings for those behaviors that the infant will ultimately adopt”. Although I do not know if there is any research done in Puerto Rico, it would be nice to see if not only be seen in the perspective of financial status but also in localization.

    On the other hand, we have Ahearn’s chapter in “Language Acquisition and Socialization” where it talks about the Chomskyan’s views in language acquisition and compares them with other linguists’ view. Like Bates and MacWhinney (1989) argument: “[T]he human capacity for language could be both innate and species-specific, and yet involve no mechanisms that evolved specifically and uniquely for language itself”. That although we are not taking Chomsky’s UG theory about innateness but also seeing that it cannot be the only thing of how humans acquire language. Later in the text, Ahearn mentions Ochs and Schieffkin’s main points for their text which are: “the process of becoming a competent member of society and how it’s realized to a large extent through language” (2001). These ideas shown in the chapter are more to enlighten us that there is no one way to see language acquisition.

    As a bilingual person born and raised in Puerto Rico I would love to see more research done on the island and how we as bilinguals could help on understanding what model of language acquisition would we have. Also seeing if Ochs and Schieffelin’s communicative development data could be replicated with bilingual Puerto Ricans.

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  12. Ochs, Schieffelin, and Ahearn in their respective writings about language acquisition and socialization explore how cultural views on babies and communication come together in different communities’ interactions with young children. In all cultures, babies are exposed to language in some way or another, and children acquire language naturally, a statement that is part of Chomsky’s “Poverty of the Stimulus” argument. All children that have no learning barriers are able to and will produce utterances in their learned languages that exceed the set of input they receive in their upbringing and regardless on how the language ideologies from where they were raised.

    As all three authors mentioned in their texts, white middle-class communities believe it is best for the child to receive language input that is a simplified version of the language spoken in the community. Although, there is no scientific or objective support to these assumptions, I find it curious how the default and dominating perspective of this approach is associated to good parenting and is never questioned by anyone outside academia. Meanwhile, the evidence that Ochs and Schieffelin present throughout three different cultural scenarios shows that all children from all three communities acquire language even though not all of them follow the white middle-class westerner method that incorporates “motherese” to teach children languages.

    From my perspective, language, as a system, exists outside culture. However, language use is inextricable to sociocultural norms. I agree with the position of the authors in that as long as there is direct or indirect contact to language, language acquisition will be successful. However, how this language is socially acquired establishes the social dynamics and expectations within a group regarding communication, which is clearly seen with the Kaluli in how adults did not try to assume emotions or desires of a child even though caregivers would sometimes speak for the child. In the case of Samoan community, the lower-class, in this instance children, are expected to explain themselves adequately as they grow since the burden of communicating meaning fell upon those of lesser status.

    After considering these two cases and comparing them to the white middle-class situation, I saw a lot of similarities to how Puerto Rican families introduce language to children and how we see children as entirely dependent of adults in many areas of life. Just as adult caretakers modify their speech when addressing children, many aspects of life are altered to fit the needs of children first. Although all communities see babies as vulnerable, only the white middle-class adjusts their lifestyle to children’s needs, including language use, which reflects how society is structured. Language use is simply another indicator of the roles and functions of each member of these communities.

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  13. Both Ahern’s (2016) and Ochs & Schieffelin’s (1984) texts intend to emphasize on the impact socialization has on language acquisition. They do so by providing examples of how different communities are socialized, how their “interactions … are culturally constructed” (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984, p. 285), and how this plays a role in how children ultimately acquire a language. They challenge Chomsky’s ideologies related to input and UG, which place the responsibility of language acquisition on biology, because interactions across the world do not follow a “biologically designed choreography” (Stern 1977, as cited in Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984, p. 299). This is not to say that biology is not factor; it merely attempts to indicate that other factors are also at play.
    One question asked which I found particularly interesting was: “In bilingual or multilingual environments, do socialization practices have an impact on which languages children learn and to what levels of proficiency?” (Ahearn, 2016, p. 71). The subjective idea of what it takes to be ‘proficient’ has led to troublesome ideologies. Depending on a specific person’s standard or idea of proficiency, bilingual/multilingual may be perceived as deficient. This is problematic in several ways. First, it pushes the idea of certain individuals being “languageless” or unable to produce any language legitimately or tolerably (Rosa, 2016). While doing research for my thesis, I found that this isn’t really a new concept, with other terms for languageless including “semilingual” (Cummins, 1979), “limited bilingual” (Cummins, 1981), “alingual” (Zentella, 1995), and “non-nons” (Pyle, 1996, as cited in MacSwan, Rolstad, & Glass, 2013, p. 395). These studies are important because of the real-life consequences that come with perpetuating these types of ideologies.
    For instance, consider the idea of a “language gap” (Ahearn, 2016, p. 75) presented in the text. If we believe our bilingual/multilingual children have this “gap” or “deficiency,” we might feel the need to incorporate pedagogical practices that, while well-intentioned, are reductionist and focused on erasure. In Ahern’s words, these programs are “overly simplistic” (2016, p. 85). These “remedial” programs that continue to be created to this day are perhaps only superficially less extreme than programs such as the one implemented in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which some Puerto Rican children attended, where the main ideology was “kill the Indian, save the man,” (Navarro-Rivera, 2006). As teachers in a colonized island, we must be asking the questions I mentioned in my previous reflection: Who decides when a language is deficient or flawed? Under what standards? Created by whom? Only after that should we create and implement programs that embrace students’ bilingualism rather than trying to replace it with a more standardized ideology of how people should use language.
    (Ana M. Tubens Perez – 445 words)

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    1. (Revised)
      This week’s texts by Laura Ahearn (2016) and Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin (1984)
      emphasize the impact that socialization has on language acquisition research. They do so by
      providing examples of how different communities are socialized, or how their “interactions …
      are culturally constructed” (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984, p. 285). In turn, these play a role in how
      children acquire a language. The authors challenge Noam Chomsky’s ideologies related to input
      and universal grammar (UG), which place the responsibility of language acquisition on biology.
      They argue that interactions across the world do not follow a “biologically designed
      choreography” (Stern 1977, as cited in Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984, p. 299). This is not to say that
      biology is not an important factor, but that other factors are also at play.

      One question which I found particularly interesting was: “In bilingual or multilingual
      environments, do socialization practices have an impact on which languages children learn and
      to what levels of proficiency?” (Ahearn, 2016, p. 71). The subjective idea of what it takes to be
      ‘proficient’ has led to troublesome ideologies. Depending on a specific person’s standard or idea
      of proficiency, bilingualism/multilingualism may be perceived as deficient. This pushes the idea
      of certain individuals as being “language-less” or unable to produce any language legitimately or
      tolerably (Rosa, 2016, p. 163). For instance, consider the idea of a “language gap” (Ahearn,
      2016, p. 75) presented in the text. If we believe our bilingual/multilingual children have this
      “gap” or “deficiency,” we might feel the need to incorporate pedagogical practices that, while
      well-intentioned, are reductionist and focused on erasure. In Ahearn’s words, these programs are
      “overly simplistic” (2016, p. 85). These “remedial” programs continue to be created to this day,
      they are less extreme than programs such as the one implemented in the Carlisle Indian
      Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where some Puerto Rican children attended and the main
      instructional ideology was “kill the Indian in him, and save the man” (Pratt 1892, as cited in
      Navarro-Rivera, 2006, p. 225).

      This western perception of “Indians” in the US during that specific time in history may be
      compared to the perception that the Kaluli have of their children: “as helpless, soft, and having
      no understanding” (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984, p. 289). However, in the case of the Indian
      school in Pennsylvania, children were treated this way all the way to graduation, meanwhile in
      the case of the Kaluli people, it only took place in the first 18 months of a child’s life. Samoans
      were described as having a similar perception of babies, but view children as “assertive” and able
      (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984, p. 296) as they get older. Out of the three examples of socialization
      and language acquisition approaches described, I related most to the white middle-class
      approach. Specifically, I’ve witnessed phenomena like “self-lowering” and “accommodation”
      (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984, p. 287) both in my experience teaching Kindergarten and in
      watching my sister raise her 2-year old son. It was interesting to see how all these children
      ultimately acquired their language, regardless of how the process was culturally shaped.
      However, it was also challenging in that it made me question, as an English teacher, what it takes
      for a student to acquire and learn a language.

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  14. Hello Dr. Morales and Class;

    I haven’t been able to read the assigned readings for this week. I’ll write my reflection during the week.

    Good afternoon.

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  15. Some physical anthropologists believe that humans (or at least, proto-humans), learned to sing before they learned to talk (or count). It may be feasible if we study the whistling communication system at La Gomera in the Canary Islands. I would like to know how Whorf would deal with a communication system so efficient and intelligible amongst the inhabitants of Gomera, that replaces spoken language. Would he be able to conclude that this mode of communication can also influence their perception of the real world? And how about cave paintings that some are nearly 60,000 years old? Did early humans have any proto-language or is it that imaging was their mode of perceiving their world in the paleolithic and the best way of communicating it to others? Possibly their European brethren would have been capable of understanding the same images. Discoveries in the island of Borneo revealed paintings remarkably similar to those in Europe, and perhaps, older. Yes, there is some kind of universal operating system in humans of which diversity is in the details. I insist that perception is not only circumscribed to language, but the whole system of brain-ware (with a significant dose of malware), software (language, art, science, math, etc.) and hardware (our bodies) unique in our species. But brain-ware must not be underestimated. Without brains, there are no perceptions or language, ergo, no society. For example, Irvine’s paper exposes memory degradation (more or less). It’s partly true since neuroscientists have done research that the brain is like a “film editor”. The hippocampus processes experiences like discrete cuts (akin to the frames in an 8 mm tape) and stored as memories. The hippo is most active when people shift from one event to the other, but remember, they are discrete pieces and there is no data on how these pieces are processed if they are personally involved. This also applies to language processing and any gap between the “frames” does not assure us that social interaction will follow the rules. And it’s a headache for judiciary authorities.
    Another example of brain processing with malware are found in the brain cells of monkeys, that also exist in the human brain. Rhesus macaques are capable of responding and remembering the outcomes of situations encountered in an exercise of game theory, both the individual’s and the others. The most famous exercise is the prisoner’s dilemma (this is a popular model in economics, finance, military strategy and of course, in criminal processes). If both prisoners confess (“cooperation”), the penalty can be lower than in the case where both do not confess (“non-cooperation”). But if one of the two cheats like a stool pigeon, one gets the lower sentence (or gets scott free) and the other is kicked into the can for the whole sentence (maybe with revenge in mind!). Therefore, there are a set of neurons in a specified area of the brain and they fire more rapidly in a cooperation scene than in the cheating ones. Neuron activity matched the other monkeys’ choices in the previous rounds. The neurons also fire faster when the monkeys play in the same room than where they isolated. It seems that neurons respond and are sensitive to social situations. Of course, this has to be tested in humans through fMRIs results. And from the point view of criminal investigation, thank God for DNA!

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