Mini essay exam 3

Please use information from the readings, lectures, and in-class discussions to inform your answers. You’re welcome to look up other sources, but you should always cite anything you use (even readings from our course).

Avoid long and/or frequent direct quotations and focus on sources. Your source citations do not count toward your maximum word count.

Blooming and buzzing, but confusing? (500–750 words)

In this course we have covered four major factors that influence how children learn language (i.e., our four “modules”): pattern recognition, cognitive biases, maturation, and environment. In each case we have seen how features of the child’s cognition and/or learning environment guide them in the process of language development. Choose a SPECIFIC phenomenon that a child must learn during the process of language development. First, illustrate the challenge the child faces in learning this thing—what is blooming, buzzing, and confusing about it? Second, explain how each of pattern recognition, cognitive biases, maturation, and environment allows the child to make sense of this rich and noisy input in learning the phenomenon. Your response must have a clear illustration of the effect of ALL FOUR factors on the phenomenon’s development, so choose your phenomenon accordingly.

• While there is no lower/upper limit on number of papers to cite, quality of response will be partly evaluated on appropriate citations of studies relating to the ideas you raise.
• Phenomena can vary from hyper specific (e.g., a single, in-the-moment labeling event) to general (e.g., acquiring a sound system). Choose something you can write about well. If you go for specific, make sure to have one sentence explaining the importance of the phenomenon for language development more broadly.

A word of caution (300–500 words)

We dedicated a whole class period to critical discussion about language development interventions and the idea of a “word gap”. While some of the work we covered is now somewhat dated (e.g., Hart & Risley’s original study), the ideas behind it are still very influential. Educators, policy makers, pediatric professionals, and parents are the common targets of this scientific discourse. Just recently, the LENA foundation published a new digital pamphlet on data collected from their egocentric recorder, using the measure of conversational turns. Please review the pamphlet (scroll until you get to the purple box at the bottom of the page).

Now, imagine that this pamphlet is going to be sent out to daycares and other early childhood education programs in the neighborhood where YOU grew up. You are offered the chance to write a cover letter to accompany the LENA pamphlet when it gets sent out. What would you want the recipients to know before they read it? Your job is to provide whatever contextualizing information you think is important, e.g., regarding methods for daylong recordings and their strengths/weaknesses, the history of this debate, specific factors in your community that would modulate the advice given by LENA, etc. Write your essay in the form of a short letter addressed to the daycare and early childhood education providers in your neighborhood.