Studies have shown that in the early stages the vocabulary development is slow, with children only producing about 50 words in the first eighteen months; however, they may understand five times as many (Bancroft & Gillen, 2007). From around 21 months the vocabulary growth is rapid and during that period the child may learn about 10 new words per week. One of the interesting features of many young children’s early vocabulary development is the manner in which they overextend a word ‘to refer to objects that lie outside its normal range of application for adults’ (Bancroft & Gillen, 2007, p.22). For instance, a little child might use the word ball to refer to anything that is round in shape and so if an adult tells a young child to ‘get the ball’, this could result in the retrieval of any object that fits, as in color, size, shape, or function. In extract 3, L.11 and L.13-15, Cindy calls one of her dolls ‘tiger’, one can well say that she is overextending the word ‘tiger’ here because either the doll is a yellow striped cuddly animal toy or else it is dressed up in a striped dress and she calls it 'a tiger' based on the property of striped pattern. De Villiers and de Villiers (1979), assert that ‘the overextension of a particular word may last for some months, but often it occurs only briefly before the child learns the correct names of the objects. Furthermore, the child may overextend only some ... words; others will be used appropriately from the beginning’.
According to Aldridge (1991) by the age of two, a child can produce only a limited number of sounds in their words – often these are p, b, t, d, m and w. The production of the r consonant comes at the age of around 3. This explains Cindy’s immature pronunciation of the word ‘carrot’ as ‘kawo’ in L.1 since children her age have difficulty producing the consonant /r/ and so typically use the consonant /w/ instead of /r/. Furthermore, since a child can produce the voiced and unvoiced /θ/ at the age of around 4 years, they often substitute it by /t/ or /d/, so chances are high that in L.15 Cindy is doing just that.
Cindy is 24 months old and at this stage, children try out new things and explore the world around them more actively. They will often choose their own activities and enjoy pretend play with their toys as can be seen in L.11-13, where Cindy is playing with her dolls and imitating her mother by talking to her dolls in ‘motherly’ tones which she has definitely seen her mother do when bringing her to bed. Children are usually talking about something which is happening, has happened or is going to happen (Vygotsky, 1967), with which they share the experience with the parent, this imparts a solid foundation for any conversation, that of shared understanding. Cindy’s language is connected to certain events of the day that have a routine, even repetitive, quality to them. Many of these events are linked to people in some way and even to interactional routines. The kinds of activities that seemingly encourage her to use language are those she initiates or at least is involved in.
Crystal (1995) identifies several stages of grammar development running from infancy through to the teenage years. He points out that at the age of about two, children first begin to use grammatical elements. In English, this includes finite auxiliaries ("is", "was"), verbal tense and agreement affixes ("-ed" and '-s'), nominative pronouns ("I", "she"), and determiners ("the", "a"). It can be seen that Cindy at the age of 24 months and 16 days, is capable of making simple sentence patterns e.g. 'they eating' (L.3). She also uses plurals correctly (L.8, ‘they both eat carrots’), and uses an ‘s’ for third person (L.15, ‘tiger wants to go to sleep). She also seems to be able to use the definite article (L.5, L.7). However, it is interesting to see how in L.12, Patsy is trying to teach Cindy to use definite article correctly by saying ‘the doll’ which Cindy ignores and continues to refer to her doll as ‘doll’ (L.13). This attempt, often employed by adults, to correct children’s grammatical errors is known as recast (Bohannon & Stanowicz, 1988). Moreover, in L.14, Patsy again refers to 'the tiger' but Cindy doesn't imitate this and says 'tiger' in L.15. Although, children often imitate the recasts of their parents or care-takers, one can see that Patsy’s recasting does not seem to have any immediate effect on Cindy’s utterance.
Numerous studies have been undertaken to find out the importance of recasts in the learning process of children. In one study, undertaken by Morgan, Bonamo & Travis (1995), three children were taken in to consideration where their parent's corrected their grammatical errors by giving recasts for lacking articles about 35% of the time. Nevertheless, the children ignored the recasts and did not start using the articles right away. They also discovered no connection between the rate of occurrence of recasts and the rate at which children's use of articles expanded over the longer period of time. Thus it can be said that parental recasts do not hasten a child's learning of articles and that children will learn articles at their own pace. However, another study, undertaken by Saxton (1998), proposes that recasts can be quite beneficial at certain points in the learning process, particularly where a child is already using the correct form about 50% of the time. If the forms have already been learnt then recasts might assist children in getting better at using articles that they have already learnt.
In this paper it was shown how children’s language develops in its early stages and how the caregivers and family members influence the development of language in these early stages. Moreover, it was highlighted how language learning is seen not as an individual matter but as a collaborative enterprise, involving interaction between the learner and family members and others. Children and adults necessarily learn how to behave as a certain kind of person (a child, girl or boy, student, teacher, politican, etc.) through their acquisition of English in specific interactions – in other words, they take on a set of identities as they learn different aspects of the language. This link between language, interaction and identity lies behind many of the more controversial aspects of the English curriculum.
Word Count: 1500
References
Aldridge M. (1991), ‘How the language grows up: an outline of how children acquire English as a mother tongue’, English Today, no.25, pp.14-20
Bancroft D. & Gillen J.(2007) in Mercer, N., Swann J., and Mayor B. (2007) Learning English, London, Routledge/Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 5-37
Bohannon, J.N. & Stanowicz, L. (1988), ‘The issue of negative evidence: adult responses to children's language errors’, Developmental Psychology, no. 24, 684-689
Crystal, D. (1995), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
De Villiers and de Villiers (1979), Early Language, London, Open Books
Lenzenweger, M.F (2010), ‘Adult-child interaction boosts mental health’ (Accessed on 7 March 2011)
Mercer N. (2007) in The Open University (2007) U211 Exploring The English Language, ‘DVD 2, Block C, Unit 17, Section 2: Early Communication, Milton Keynes, The Open University
Morgan, J.L., Bonamo, K.M. & Travis, L.L. (1995), ‘Negative evidence on negative evidence’, Developmental Psychology, 31/2, 180-197
Saxton, M., Kulcsar, B., Marshall, G. & Rupra, M. (1998), ‘The longer-term effects of corrective input: an experimental approach’, Journal of Child Language
Vygotsky, L.S (1967), ‘Play and its role in the mental development of the child’, Soviet Psychology, vol.5, pp.6-18