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Does Social Class Influence Language Development

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Submitted By lelatara
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By the time they are three or four years old, children are able to acquire language spoken around them, regardless of its complexity. Development of language is universal thing and is mostly influenced by the surrounding of the one who is a language learner. Language enables children to share their feelings, intents, desires and to express themselves. Parents and caregivers share this significant role in children's language development. Children's first attempts are greatly influenced by the information and meanings directed to them by their social communicative partners. However, that conversation is dependent upon many factors, the one that shall be further examined is the effect of social class. There is wealth of empirical studies suggesting that all aspects of language that children learn are highly influenced by the socioeconomic status of their communicative partners. For example, Irwin's studies (1948, as cited in Raph, 1965) have shown the superiority of the speech sound of infants whose parents belonged to middle-class families over those of infants whose parents belonged to lower-class. Clearly, there are big differences between classes in the way they speak. Furthemore, Bernstein (1972, as cited in Piché, Rubin & Michlin, 1978) said that the language is characterised by the dissimiliraties in socialization process which are reflection of different social structural orders within the family. Additionally, the social structural bases of family have an effect on their communication orientation. Thus, the lower class families are characterised by a pattern role-to-role relations, in contrast to middle-class families where they are presumed to be characterised by a pattern of person-to-person role relations. Cook-Gumperz (1973, as cited in Piché et al., 1978) demostrated how social class made an impact on mothers and their children strategies of

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