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Social Feedback

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Goldstein performed this experiment to discover how social feedback influences babbling and speech development in young infants, and whether social feedback affects an infant’s speech development. To perform this experiment, Goldstein took 30 infants, randomly chosen from birth announcements, ranging from 6-10 months along with their mothers and randomly assigned them to 1 of 2 groups, either the CC or YC group. The experiment occurred in a large playroom and consisted of 30-minute play sessions, during these sessions, how the mother responded and at what rate she responded to the infant’s vocalizations was manipulated (Goldstein, 2003). Half of the mothers were instructed to responded immediately when their infant made a vocalization(CC) …show more content…

Overall, the experiment determined that CC infants had a significant increase in the number and quality of their vocalizations during the social response period while YC infants did not. CC infant’s vocalizations were also more advanced than the infants in the YC group (Goldstein, 2003). These results suggest that the more social interaction a child receives the more significant their language development over time. It is observed that children learn from social interaction; the CC infants received more social interaction when making vocalizations which caused them to increase their total number of vocalizations, which led to an increased quality of vocalizations, which supports the interactionist argument that children develop language through interaction with others and social cues. These results do conflict with the current view on language development, that infants learn by imitating the language of their caregivers. During the experiment, the mothers did not have to vocally respond, they could smile at their child, move closer to them or use other physical cues when their child made a vocalization. The children in the experiment still had an increase in the number and quality of the vocalizations even if the mother did not respond to them verbally. Goldstein’s experiment determined that social interaction to an infant’s babbling does have an influence on their language development, and help further determine just have human language

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