The Child's Acquisition of Language

Children are born with the potential for learning language but they begin as "a clean slate".

The subsequent development and especially their ability to absorb the "rules" of language teaches us a great deal about how our language is structured.

Understanding how language develops in the young child can also help us to encourage effective learning in children, which in turn can make them more creative members of society and unlock their own potential.

The following files of children's language are available:

Catherine at 2.10 years, transcript

Two years and counting. This sound file shows how Catherine at two years has learned the counting words (1, 2, 4, 3, 10) but does not know how to apply them.

At 3 years and 3 months, Catherine is repeating rhymes with which she practises intonation and sound patterns. Not all her sounds conform to adult patterns and she will not be able to utter all phonemes of RP until she is approaching 7 years.

At 4 years and 2 months Catherine's conversation about her drawing sounds noticeably more grown up, probably because she has adopted more adult vowels. Some of her consonants, however, are still approximations. She is also reacting and responding to a quite adult conversation with her father and reflecting on her own drawing in the light of comments.

Examples of writing and of speaking and listening - including movie clips - by school age children are available on the National Curriculum website. students and teachers can either assess the speakers using National Curriculum guidelines or their own linguistic criteria. Look at the NC level descriptions and consider whether they are useful to you as a student of linguistics. Would you change them - if so, how and why?
Look at examples of speaking from different abilities and ages. What sort of development is taking place?
Propose a hypothesis to explain the features you find in these movie clips. Some of the clips are worth transcribing and analysing in detail to justify your hypothesis.