Dr Robert Winston

Dr Robert Winston

After watching Winston’s short video on children’s language acquisition, I found out some interesting information:

-        Children use a different part of the brain, in comparison with an adult, when acquiring new lexis and language. This makes it much easier for a young child to develop a second language, rather than an adult.

-        The human Larynx is much higher in a young child, therefore it is much harder to pronounce certain sounds. In addition this makes them a lot more viable to choking. However, the Larynx naturally drops but 3 cm around the age of 1.

-        A 15 month old baby has to co-ordinate 3o different muscles in order to make certain sounds.

-        Once a child has reached the toddler stage, they are likely to be learning an average of 10 new words every day.

-        Alongside language, children have to learn and be taught self-awareness. Once learnt, they can demonstrate this through the use of 1^st personal pronouns. However, one drawback of self-awareness is ‘terrible-twos’. This is when the children realises its needs and knows how to have them met. An example would be throwing a tantrum in order to get a specific toy.

Evie assessment

Discuss Evie’s phonological and lexical development.

A two year, two month old baby (Evie – E) is sat in a garden with her Grandma (G) and Great Grandma (GG), pointing out the planes in the sky. The transcript lasts 57 seconds and the development of the child’s language acquisition is very apparent, including the child’s word-stage and demonstrates the lexis/phonemes she struggles to pronounce.

Firstly, Evie is seemingly in the telegraphic stage of David Crystal’s stage theory. This ‘stage theory’ is the theory that children develop their speech going through different stages. The telegraphic stage is when a child’s utterances are almost fully constructed of content words; greatly lacking function words, such as ‘a’ and ‘is’. This demonstrates that Evie is developing at the ‘natural’ rate of language development. Examples of this are seen, as she utters “aeroplane again” and “there plane”.

The very first utterance of the transcript, “look” is a verb and an imperative. It would seem that Evie is at the one-word stage at this point, however, we can assume that she is simply over-excited at the sight of a plane that she simply does not think about constructing full sentences. In addition, it is most likely she is using para-linguistic features at this point – using gestures to convey what she means. The use of gestures demonstrates a child’s understanding and will often be used because simple gestures, like pointing are much easier to do and comprehend than actual speech.

After repeating her first utterance, Evie’s Great Grandmother proceeds to identify the planes, saying “the aeroplanes” which Evie actually says simultaneously. We can assume that GG’s mention of the plane refreshed Evie’s memory, therefore she specifies what she wanted her grandparents to look at in her first utterance. Evie struggles to pronounce her phase “aeroplane again”. The word ‘aeroplane’ consists of a constant cluster that proves to be too difficult for her to sound out sufficiently, therefore she deletes the sounds of the ‘r’, ‘o’ and ‘a’, in order to be able to pronounce the word to the extent that she is understandable. In addition, this is an example of syllable deletion as Evie pronounces ‘aeroplane’ as just two syllables, as appose to three. When verbalising the word ‘again’, Evie demonstrates for a second time, syllable deletion as she removes the ‘a’ and only utters ‘gen’. Quite obviously words with less syllables will be easier to pronounce, but it this case, one might think that a simple ‘a’ would not be of the most difficult tasks; even for young Evie. However this is most likely an example of perceptual discriminability – with words such as ‘again’ it is much easier for a child to hear the stronger sounding ‘gen’ over the initial ‘a’. As a result the child (Evie in this case) will not even realise that there is an ‘a’ at the beginning of the word, therefore not pronouncing it.

Moving away from her pronunciation, Evie shows that she has already reached the point of her language acquisition, as she is labelling the sky and aeroplanes correctly. Labelling is one of the three stages stated by famous linguist, Aitchison in 1987. He suggested that a child will go through three stages (labelling, packaging and network building), when developing their language.

In her fifth utterance, Evie says “in the sky”. She is unable to articulate the word ‘sky’ accurately and uses substitution to replace the initial fricative, ‘s’, with a completely different sounding ‘g’. This is because the articulatory ease of the ‘s’ is very low in comparison to the ‘g’ – therefore it is much easier for Evie to vocalise. This change of sound could also be due assimilation, as the ‘g’ sound flows a lot smoother with the rest of the word, making it less difficult to pronounce.

Later on in the transcript Evie utters “there plane, plane”. In this phrase Evie does not pronounce the lateral ‘l’ sound in the word ‘plane’. This is due to the fact it is naturally harder to pronounce lateral sounds, therefore Evie does not pronounce them at all. In addition, this is a prime example of reduplication. There is not necessarily a linguistic interpretation for this specific reduplication and can be implied that it is simply due to her excitement.