Sociology 3701: Worksheet--"Baby Talk"...This is an old video (a PBS Nova presentation from 1984) but it does a beautiful job of showing the workings of a scientific community as they try to understand some of the central questions of psycho-linguistics, and I see a lot of overlap with some of the central concerns of what sociologists term symbolic interactionism. Some of these themes are taken up by O'Brien in the essay that begins on p. 63, which is your reading assigment for today.

1. What was the traditional (pre-1957) belief about how children acquire language, and what happened in 1957? How would you summarize Chomsky's new theory (sometimes called "nativism"), and do you see the "social constructionists" depicted in this film as rejecting Chomsky's theory?

2. How did the film suggest that children may learn that turn-taking is part of human communication?

3. What kinds of words are typically a child's first words? Why do you suppose these sorts of words come first?

4. Define the following:
syntax

semantics

pragmatics

scaffolding (also give some examples)

5. O'Brien (p. 72) defines "the generative property of language" in terms of "the ability to forumulate novel (new) but mutuallly understood statements." Give one or more examples of this property as seen in the film.

6. Thomas Scheff, in an article called "A Theory of Genius" (in your text, beginning on p. 297, though it isn't assigned) , suggests that modern linguistics has discovered that "all humans have genius in language." He defines genius in terms of creative intelligence, which he in turn defines as "the ability to find a new solution to a new problem." Where do we see that kind of genius at work among the children portrayed in this film?

7. What are the circumstances in which that human genius for language might be more limited, if the social constructionists are on the right track? In other words, what kinds of kids are less likely to devellop a rich and sophisticated use of language, with what likely consequences?

8. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, defines "normal science" as the efforts of a group of scientists who share a common paradigm for how to understand some segment of reality(here, the use of language by humans) and are trying together to work out the details The psycho-linguists portrayed in this video call themselves "social interactionists," but I see their theory as overlapping a great deal with the theory known in sociology as symbolic interactionism. Like all scientific communities, they are in communication with each other (journals, professional meetings, joint research, correspondence, etc.) as they look to extend their theory into areas that have not yet been fully understood or that seem to pose challenges for their theory. . What are some of those areas?