Summary of our first meeting

In order to familiarise ourselves with the RSEL project and start postulating potential ideas, Aman booked a private study room in the library on Tuesday 8^th October from 12.00-2.00.

We began by watching Alison’s first v-lecture on choosing a suitable topic to focus our project on where she highlights the importance of selecting an area of English that is of interest to everyone. This prompted a group discussion over possible research topics for the project. We all immediately came to an agreement that focusing specifically on grammar and word classes would be an unlikely option to satisfy our intrinsic motivation.  However, the idea of Child Language Acquisition was brought to the table and proved a popular preference.

After deciding to focus our project on Child Language Acquisition, we then thought of possible routes we could go down. I (Emily) mentioned my interest in the language development of feral children – specifically the case of Genie – in comparison to non-feral children. This led to the suggestion of possibly comparing the rate and quality of language acquisition and development between feral and non-feral children. However a more thorough examination of this highlighted various problems we would encounter, particularly querying whether our data collection and analysis would be limited thus cornering ourselves. Yet the case of Genie fascinated all individuals in the group and we were therefore keen on being able to incorporate this aspect into the study if possible. After discussing the Genie case in some depth, we realised it was the lack of social input that affected her language development. Therefore after careful wording and consideration, we came up with the following draft research question;

To what extent is the lack of social input detrimental to a child’s language acquisition and development?

We believe this question enables us to draw on a variety of elements within child language acquisition without being too broad and open. However we are aware and understand there may be difficulty in obtaining data for this question specifically regarding feral children as there are only a few rare documented cases. Therefore in time for our second meeting next week we each have a different aspect to research in order to ensure this option is viable before we start working on it.

Agenda for Tuesday 15^th October 2013:

·         Discuss any problems regarding finding relevant research

·         Decide on key books to use