Language Acquisition

- Humans are the only living organisms capable of producing complex and varied sounds that can form language due to our brains.
- Different areas of our brains are responsible for different tasks, when we speak we're using several different parts of our brain in conjunction.
- Evidence suggests that humans are born with the inate ability to produce language, however the nature vs nurture debate is still a hot topic among language theorist.
- We have a gene that enables us to use langage, in one very rare case a family without the gene did no posess the motor skills to speak properly.
- Different case studies suggest that most of the key skills regarding language are aquired during the first few years of a childs development, after a certain amount of time language becomes much harder to learn.

Gossip

Casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details which are not confirmed as true:

‘he became the subject of much local gossip’

Etymology

1.       One who has contracted spiritual affinity with another by acting as a sponsor at a baptism.

2.       Applied to a woman's female friends invited to be present at a birth.

3.       A familiar acquaintance, friend, chum. Formerly applied to both sexes, now only to women.

4.       A person, mostly a woman, of light and trifling character, esp. one who delights in idle talk; a newsmonger, a tattler.

Gossip in its current form was first used around the 17^th century and the definition began to take a more negative tone in the 19^th century, from describing a woman of ‘light and trifling character’ to ‘trifling and groundless rumour’.

Between the 14^th and 19^th century the word could also be used to describe women as well as men and could be used in a sense meaning friend.

A Surgeon's Care

The extract (H) taken from A Surgeon’s Care, a book published by Mills and Boon. The purpose of this text is to entertain and the intended audience are middle aged women. The text coveys the feeling that the man in this context has much more power than the woman, this is established in the first line in which the male character is referred to as ‘the famous Professor  Chadwick’ giving him some kind of status through both his title and his implied reputation. The text goes on to portray the female character as unprofessional compared to her male counterpart, a stereotype that the male character reinforces when he says ‘Where on earth is Dr Hatfield?’, a question that causes the female character (who is in fact Dr Hatfield) to establish herself In her position. The line suggests the stereotype that women cannot be doctors.

Unfortunately rather than going out of her way to counteract the implications of this stereotype the female character instead shows a lack of competence and professionalism in her work, seemingly unable to focus on her work and instead fixation on the male surgeon.