This Article Caused Major Controversy...

This Guardian Article tells the story of major criticism being given to the writer of a story about Barbie which was written with intention of inspiring young girls to have careers in areas they wouldn't necessarily think about entering and also to empower them but instead made Barbie an engineer that couldn't do the job herself unless she had a man to help her. Read the article yourself and see how you feel about the issue and whether it was right that the writer of the book received major criticism from many people.

Anti-Heroes vs. Anti Heroines

Have a look at this article here. This article from the guardian simultaneously intrigued and angered me. Emma Unsworth, the writer of this article, explores anti-heroes and anti-heroines and the idea that readers are more likely to be intrigued by anti-heroes because they are more likable, mysterious, and dark all of which capture some readers even if they feel as though they must be disliked due to their actions. She then goes on to talk about anti-heroines and how readers react negatively towards them because they are likely to be characters that go against conventions of society and are unlike other female characters making them more unlikable. A great read. Made me look deeper into both my English subjects and is quite useful. Have you heard of any of the books in the list with famous anti-heroines? 

Child Language Acquisition Research Task

Even at an early age, most children learn to discriminate certain pairs of consonants and vowels. Examples of this are the syllables “pa” and “ba”. This is due to our biology, we are born with special “feature detectors” that respond to the speech in our environment. Some sounds that develop early on are “gu” and “ga”, this is because they relate to the babbling that babies do. Although in the past it was believed that there was no link between babbling and early language, recent research has shown that babbling allows them to practice sounds ready for when they begin to speak and the sounds they babble will be similar to the sounds they use in their early vocabulary.

Consonant + vowel sequences usually develop first, this is also due to their biology because the child begins to move their tongues, move their lips and just explore the use of their mouths to communicate.

There are different types of babbling that children do. One is reduplicated babbling which is where babies repeat the use of the same consonant sound. Another type is variegated babbling where there is switching between the consonants and vowels from one syllable to the next.

Once the child reaches a year old, they could potentially be able to recognise several dozen words involving a wide range of vowels and consonants but their ability to pronounce them is restricted to two or three consonants and a single vowel sound.

Some consonant sounds such as “b” and “m” are easy to create and are usually among the first sounds to develop. More complex sounds such as “ch”, “sp” and “fl” are consonant clusters and develop later on. Many vowel sounds are learned at roughly two and half and by the age of four most children know how to use them in their speech.

Based on research done with one 13 month year old, the child new three phonemes - “b”, “d” and “a”. With these phonemes the child was able to create the sound “ba” and communicate words such as “baby” and “bath”. At around 15 months, the child had acquired the phonemes “m”, “p” and “u” and with these phonemes he created “up” which enabled him to say words like “cup” where the consonant is at the end of the word which some children do not acquire until later since it is difficult. It is hard to make predictions about the order in which children will acquire new sounds and one reason for this is because of every child’s environment, each child will grow up in a different environment and will be exposed to different names such as for sibling and pets and so some children will acquire some sounds much sooner than others simply because of their exposure to those particular sounds. Some children can have favourite sounds which leads some children to changing adult pronunciations of words to enable them to use their favourite sounds. Also, some children avoid other sounds like dropping certain consonants at the ends of words which is likely to be because they find those sounds difficult to pronounce and so avoid them completely.  

Although children are likely to acquire different sounds at different times, from research we have found some of the ways children change the sounds in words in order to attempt to use them:  

• They tend to replace fricative consonants by stopping, for example “see” becomes “ti:”
• They tend to replace the velar consonants with alveolar ones e.g. “gone” becomes “dɑn” (please note that the symbol may not be correct because I couldn’t find it on the list of special characters.)
• They tend to avoid consonant clusters like they will pronounce “sky” as “kaI”
• They tend to clip consonants at the end of words so “hat” becomes “ha”
• They tend to drop unstressed syllables so they may say “nana” instead of “banana”
• Consonant and vowel harmony is found with identical or near identical syllables e.g. in dog or window

At the age of 4, all vowel sounds and diphthongs may have been used but consonants, on the other hand, are likely to be first used correctly at the beginning of words. Consonants used at the end of words are likely to emerge later. Even after children have reached 4, they may still be experiencing the fis phenomenon (for example, pronouncing that as dat) as it is very difficult to learn due to a child’s biology and the way they use their mouths to create certain sounds. More complex consonant clusters develop later, children may say “stwing” instead of “string”. Children may also have a preference for “w” and “j” phonemes rather than “l” and “r”, some children will say jeg instead of leg because they prefer that phoneme or because they find “l” more difficult to produce.

Reduplication occurs in the second year and children say things like “wow” (water) and “bubu” (bottle). Children even reduplicate words that are monosyllabic, they might say “bobo” instead of “ball”. Reduplication could occur because they want to play with language but it is more likely done so that the child can cope with hard pronunciation of words. Children learn to master words in stages by using a phonetic outline and then perfect the word over time.

Bibliography:

• Crystal, D.C., 2006. How Language Works. London: Penguin Books
• Crystal, D.C., 2010. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Third Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ministry of Education, 2000. Speech Sound Development. [online] Available at: <http://www.kidshealth.org.nz/speech-sound-development>. [Accessed 3 November 2014]