Child Language - Zach Texts

Zach drawing a banana-

The genre of this text is a conversation. The transcript has a formal register; it is a conversation between Zach and his parents. The mode of the text is spoken; it is a spontaneous and interactional conversation. The purpose of the transcript is to discuss, Zach is speaking about his day and his surroundings such as his ‘little pad’ and drawing a banana.

Within the transcript, his mother uses a lot of interrogatives. This may be because of the contextual factor, his age. Zach is two years old which means he is at his two word utterance stage, going onto the telegraphic stage. His mother uses interrogatives which lead to adjacency pairs. His mother also uses interrogatives to ask Zach to elaborate his speech such as ‘for the banana (.) what can the banana have (.) its three things (.) what are they?’ Zach had stated that a banana, has three things and his mother is asking him to go in to detail with his speech to challenge him to use more language such as adjectives. At Zach’s stage he will usually know more than 200 words. He has proved he knows nouns, such as his local topics like banana, biscuits, his 'little pad'. He also shows he is new to adjectives 'little pad' and 'because its too small'. He hasn't used many adjectives which may be because he had recently been introduced to them and has started recognising factors about nouns such as the size of objects.

Zach’s mother echoes him when he uses overgeneralistion, ‘skins’, in conversation. ‘and here’s the skins’ ‘oh (.) are the are the skins off are they?’ Zach is at a young age, he is at the telegraphic stage so he is familiar with nouns such as ‘skin’ but may not know the difference between it being plural or not. His mother may echoe him to give him confidence whilst learning speech rather than confusing him by modelling what he had said in a non standard form.

Chomsky has a theory about language acquisition, 1960’s. He believes that every child is born with a language acquisition device which enables them to learn and produce language because it is a natural mental ability. He believes that LAD converts the major principles of a language and it’s grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children then learn different vocabulary and relate the syntactic structures from LAD to form different sentences. He believes that children cannot learn language by imitation alone because adults use irregular language in general conversation. Adult’s speech can be broken up and sometimes ungrammatical. Zach using ‘skins’ backs up Chomsky’s theory as in the environment; he would have heard his mother say ‘skin’ instead of ‘skins’ which shows that not everything is imitated. However, Zach may of heard his mum pluralising words such as ‘cows’ and he may have picked up on it and is applying it to other words.  There is evidence to support Chomsky’s theory such as when children are learning language, it is unusual for them to get there subjects, objects and words in the incorrect order. Also when they use overgeneralization such as ‘I drawed’, instead of ‘i drew’ show that it can’t be just imitation that allows them to learn language. There is evidence against Chomsky’s theory such as language can be learnt from interactions with other people (Bruner).

Build a robot- Zach and his mum-

The genre of this text is a conversation. It has an informal register as it has non standard use of language such as ‘doo doo doo dooo’ which is said by Zach. The audience of this transcript is Zach and Halla as they are having a conversation. The mode of the text is spoken. It is a dialogue which is spontaneous.  The purpose of this text is to discuss the project of building a robot which is the subject of the transcript.

Throughout the transcript, Zach pauses a great amount within his sentences. He is not very fluent. This may be because he is focused on what he is doing physically, building his robot. He is also ill which may affect his speech. ‘We don’t need breakfast (.) it’s gonna take a little time now (2) cos it went wrong before (.) now we (.) then it healed and now (.) it will take a little time (.) for the robot to heal again (2). Because of his age he may need to think more about what he is saying, meaning it takes him longer to get his words out, rather than if he was older and more experienced, he would be more familiar with new words. Zach uses adjectives in his speech such as ‘lots’ of sellotape, ‘long’ bit. Zach may have recently become familiar with adjectives because of his age, meaning his speech is broadening. Zach uses many declaratives, in response to his mum’s interrogatives. He also uses an exclamative ‘Tadah!’ which shows that from 13 months onwards, his speech has developed significantly.

Throughout the first conversation, Zach brings up the topic of the robot, but his mum, Halla, sets the agenda by asking him interrogatives, which leads to adjacency pairs of Zach responding. In the second half, Zach is setting the agenda as he is dominating the conversation. He is saying to his mum that they have to wait rather than get breakfast. ‘Yeah (.) it’s gonna be a long time though (.) but we’re not gonna have breakfast still’. This supports Zimmerman’s and West’s theory, the Dominance model, that men dominates the conversation over women. It also contradicts the theory as Zach does not interrupt his mum, the theory claims that men interrupt more than women. He uses a declarative to tell his mum what they are going to do, rather than asking her.

In the first transcript, i looked at the first 10 utterances that Zach uses. I look at the morphemes within the 10 utterances. There were 80 morphemes within the first 10 of Zach’s utterances. I divided the number of morphemes with the number of utterances (80/10) which got me the mean length of utterance, 8. In the second transcript, build a robot, i looked at the first 10 utterances as well to make sure the data is reliable. There were 112 morphemes in Zach’s first 10 utterances, meaning the mean length of utterance was 11.2. The difference between the two transcripts mean length utterance is 3.2. This proves that since Zach has got a little bit older, his speech has improved and he has a broader range of language.  Zach was ill on the ‘build a robot’ transcript which may have reduced the amount of language he would usually use, so if he was feeling okay, he may have had a greater mean length of utterance.