Children’s informal interactions, friendships and relationships with others in…

Concept

Language socialization (Ochs & Schieffelin) is the sociolinguistic-developmental process by which children, through everyday informal interaction with family, peers, and their wider community, simultaneously learn to use language the way their community expects and learn the community's social and cultural norms through that very language use. It is distinct from Piaget's general cognitive-adjustment mechanisms and from broad, language-independent cultural learning.

Application

The stem describes children's informal interactions, friendships, and relationships with others in their community as the basis for a specific form of language. This is exactly the process language socialization names: unstructured, everyday talk with friends, family, and community members through which children acquire and refine both their language use and their understanding of community norms.

Cross-check

• Accommodation and assimilation (Piaget) are general cognitive-developmental mechanisms describing how the mind adjusts or incorporates new experience into existing schemas — they describe cognition in general, not the language-and-relationships process the stem asks about.

• Enculturation is the broad anthropological process of absorbing an entire culture's customs, values, and practices — wider than language and not specific to informal peer/community interaction.

• Language socialization uniquely names the process linking informal community interaction to language use and social-norm learning — matching the stem precisely.

Hence, the interactions described are based on language socialization.