Child Language

Jean Stilwell Peccei, Richard Hudson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134640393
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Building on the established strengths of the first edition, Child Language has now been fully updated and includes some basic theory content, more exercises and summaries at the end of each unit.
Child Language:
* introduces students to key areas involved in the study of children's language: vocabulary development, word and sentence structure, conversational skills and pronunciation
* contains a corpus of children's language
* includes suggestions for project work.

STARTING TO TALK 1

We introduce the study of language development and begin to analyse children’s earliest vocabularies by the types of concepts which they first put into words.

Christian, one month old. not keen on having a bath:
Waaaaaaa!

Christian. 2 years old. not keen on hearing a scary story: No talk!

Christian. 4 1/2 years old. not keen on leaving for his first day at school:

Mum, I don’t think I want to go through with this!

Christian’s accomplishment was quite remarkable, if you think about it.
Imagine yourself suddenly placed in a land where no one has ever heard English and whose inhabitants speak ‘Yakish’, a language both utterly unknown to you and not remotely similar to any language that you do know. Your task is to become a competent and confident speaker of Yakish. You must learn the correct form for making positive and negative statements, asking questions and making requests. You have to be able to describe people and things and talk about past, present and future events according to the rules of Yakish. In addition, you must be able to understand the meanings of at least 10,000 individual words in this language and be able to pronounce the words you use with a ‘native accent’. Hearing Yakish and trying to speak it yourself are the only tools at your disposal. You cannot write anything down, use a tape-recorder, consult a book or hire a teacher. You have a little less than five years in which to do all this. If you want to, you can spend all your free time and energy on the task. Unlike the small child, you already know how to feed and dress yourself, and you do not have to bother with minor taskslike learning to walk or finding out how the world works while you are tackling the language.

Christian’s accomplishment may have been remarkable, but it was certainly not unique. Children around the world, from all cultures and all language communities manage to become competent speakers of their native language in the first five years of life.

How children gain such a command of their native language with all its intricate systems of sound, meaning and grammatical structure in such a short space of time is a fascinating question. We cannot ask children how they are doing it. Nor can we remember how we did it ourselves. Much of the insight into the course of language development that we do have, has come from an analysis of the language that children actually produce. The purpose of this book is to give you some of the skills that are necessary for this kind of analysis.

As you will see, children do not passively soak up their native language. They actively apply themselves to cracking the code. In the process, they make mistakes. But these mistakes are not random ones.They reflect the rule systems that the children are building for themselves and provide an insight into the kinds of ‘educated guesses’ that they are making about the way their language works. Although we will be concentrating almost entirely on children acquiring English as their native language, the stages they go through and the strategies they use are similar in children everywhere.

By the time they are a year old, babies already seem to understand several words. They have also started to communicate with the people around them by their gestures and tone of voice.Then at about this age, children produce their first recognizable, meaningful words. They have started to communicate with language, and this is where we begin.

EXERCISE

1.1 The words in the following list are typically among the first 50 or so words that children learn to say and use.

ball	all gone	no
dog	juice	Daddy
give	Mummy	milk
bye-bye	hi	car
dirty	nice	more
cat	yes	this
sit	up	down
baby	stop	put
go	shoe	biscuit

Not surprisingly, these words tend to be ones closely connected with the child’s everyday world. But we can analyse this list in a bit more detail. Try classifying these words by the types of concepts which they express. For example:

1. Naming things or people (N): juice
2. Actions/events (A): give
3. Describing/modifying things (M): dirty
4. Personal/social words (S): bye-bye

Comment

In her study of eighteen children’s first 50 words, Katherine Nelson (1973) classified the words in our list like this:

Naming things (N)	Actions/events (A)
ball	give
dog	put
juice	El
Mummy	stop
Daddy	go
milk	up
cat	down
car
baby
shoe
bitcun

Personal/social (S)	Modifying things (M)
yes	dirty
hi	nice
no	more
bye-bye	this
	all gone

Modifier

By classifying words in this way, Nelson was able to make some interesting observations. First, she noted that the largest group of words in her sample (about 60 per cent) were those that named people, animals and things. The second largest group were words that expressed or demanded actions. Usually, these were obvious actions like sit or put, but this group also included some location words like up and down. Young children usually use these words in the sense of pick up or get down. The next largest group was the MODIFIERS, like mine, this and nice which can be used to describe a range of people or objects. Personal/social words such as yes, no and bye-bye made up about 8 per cent of the sample overall.

Nelson then looked more closely at the largest category of early words and analysed it by the kinds of things that tend to be named by children when they first start to speak.

EXERCISE

1.2 Below are two lists of words that name objects. List A contains words that frequently appeared in children’s first 50 words, while list B contains ones that rarely or never appeared in very early vocabularies.

A				B
clock				sofa
key				floor
blanket				lamp
sh...