The plan - 2nd post

Developmental psychologists have done much work into children's' acquisition of language and the dynamics therein. It is necessary at this point to define a few more things. Children explore their vocal muscles, and therefore sounds, whilst adults need only explore a few which are contrasted against their mother tongue. This suggests that adults are able to make the process much more effective, efficient and conscious. Having said that, they are still bound to the same natural process.

Research suggests that children learn words increasingly fast until they reach a 'critical mass' of vocabulary when they begin combining words into more intricate sentences. These sentences are, of course, natural authentic constructions. They might be 'parentese' constructions (emphasising accent/tone/whatever) but they still have highly collocated lexicalised items i.e. “Does the birdy wirdy want to drinky winky some water porta”. The child grows up with this 'parentese' but notices the modifications of vocabulary (birdy wirdy -bird) but the super-structure (does the ___ want to ___ some ___?) remains the same as does the collocations. 'Birds' 'drink'. 'Want to' 'drink'. 'drink' 'water'. The child evolves unconsciously. Adults can bypass this entire process of exploration and 'parentese' by knowledge of the process and therefore analysing the process and using other techniques to speed up the process.

Step 1 – using the 'Roman room' memory technique (http://www.wikihow.com/Remember-Lists-of-Words-With-the-Roman-Room-Trick) and other mnemonics (http://www.mindtools.com/memory.html), a person is able to memorise huge quantities of words to a high level of accuracy in a short space of time.

Using these techniques of memory, and lists of the 100 most common verbs, nouns, adjectives adverbs and expressions (downloaded from google), I will attempt 100 words/ phrases per week whilst also exposing myself to as many constructions which are frequently encountered in everyday life.

Step 2 – by introducing frequently encountered constructions into memory and noting them down, one can precipitate the second stage of acquisition (noticing collocations and sentence frames). But emphasis must first be placed on acquiring the lists of lexicalised common words.

Bob McMurray writes "Children are going to get that word spurt guaranteed, mathematically, as long as a couple of conditions hold," .... "They have to be learning more than one word at a time, and they must be learning a greater number of difficult or moderate words than easy words. Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, I found that if those two conditions are true, you always get a vocabulary explosion." (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070802182054.htm)

Adhering to these principles, I will attempt 100 words/phrases this week and report on the success/ failure/ changes next week. 

Need to be flexible.