Roger Brown was one of the first psychologists to use a technique to study language development called ‘naturalistic observation’. This method is used to analyse and describe the behaviour of children in their natural setting. The person investigating and making observations intervenes as little as possible and could even remain unobserved by the children taking part. The child’s behaviour would be recorded objectively, recording what is seen rather than what can be interpreted by behaviour. There are certain advantages to this technique, these include: it is a more natural environment for the child and therefore the behaviour is naturally occurring rather than the potential to be false in a laboratory (where children may behave abnormally), …show more content…
An example of a study that Brown undertook was in 1962 when he studied two children, a boy aged 27 months and a girl aged 18 months old. Both children had highly educated parents and both children were only children at the time of the study. Clearly this highlights the disadvantages of such a study, the two children were from a similar background and with such a small range it would be hard to know if the observations really could be related to a range of children from different backgrounds. Brown discovered that children had what he called ‘telegraphic speech’ which is when, in general, nouns verbs and sometimes adjectives are retained whilst auxiliary verbs, articles, prepositions and conjunctions are left out of sentences. Sometimes, under stress, adults revert to this form of speech. Despite the fact so many words are omitted, telegraphic speech is actually quite good at communicating needs. Another theory of language development is that of ‘operant conditioning’ as described by Skinner. Skinner believes that when a child is at the stage of learning single words, he/she will use