Today our topic of discussion is- Analyzing the categories
Analyzing the categories
The above mentioned categories are formed mainly on the basis of a process of child language that gradually sprouts out by semantically and perceptually labeling the language. In the following sections these categories will be descriptively analyzed with examples to fulfill the outcomes and address the research questions.
Early language use
According to the stages of language developments, children at a very early age (around from 3 to 6 months) start to use the language to fulfill their needs (Wood, 2010). This very early period of speech production is called the pre- linguistic or pre-speech stage.
At this stage, a child learns to control the sounds he produces and tries to put them together in vocal play; but they are only sound manipulations not proper words.
Cooing, crying, burping and laughter are the vocalizations made at this level of the child to express feelings. After these, children start stringing the sounds together and through babbling, gradually the child develops utterances like ‘ba-ba’ or ‘ma-ma’ (age 6 months to 12
months). Most of the sounds that a child produces before uttering controlled series of *consonant- vowel syllables’ are nothing more than the practice of sound manipulation and sound sequence in order to gain necessary motor skills to create words. Thus, under this category ‘early language use the following three levels of early speech productions are discussed-
(a) Holophrases
(b) Word combinations
(c) Early utterances (including sentences)
(a) Holophrases:
The use of a single word to mean a whole concept is referred to as “holophrase” and the stage is called the ‘holophrastic stage. This stage starts from 6 months onwards (usually 10 months is the perfect starting point). A child starts to utter one single word at a time, so it is called the ‘single word stage’ also.
The meaning of the word expresses here changes by the context in which it takes place. A single word can be used to refer to a single thing or even to mean a whole sentence (like commands) also. For example-
• The child Anna used the word /tata/ in three ways to mean three different things-
-as the actual meaning ‘bye”,
– to mean someone else is not at home and
-to mean she wants to go out.
• The child Fuko used the word /dudu/ to mean- -the actual word ‘milk’ and
-to mean that he wants to have some milk.
– The child Ikra used the word/goom/ to mean- -the actual word “hot” and
-to mean that she wants someone to turn on the fan
Eye movements and sometimes hand gestures are used together with the single words to make the meanings more specific. Later, this single utterance turns to ‘word combinations’ that makes communication more appropriate and perfect. Like-
-/baba tata/= (Father is not at home.)
-/mama dudu/= (Mom, I want to have milk.)
-/goom lage/= (I am feeling hot.)
(b)Word Combinations: At around at the age of one year and half (18 months) toddlers produce two-word combinations (proto sentences). With the use of previously learned vocabularies and new words, children produce their very early sentences.
At this stage vocabulary develops faster.
One of the major features of this word combination stage is the omission of ‘function words,’ such as articles, auxiliary verbs, inflections, prepositions, and the copula ‘is’ (Brown, 1973). These sentences are the combinations of a noun or a verb with a modifier.
This helps the child produce sentences like-declarative, interrogative, imperative or negative. For example.
– The child Sunny said-
-/amma boy/= (Mother I am afraid).
-/amma jampa/= (‘Mother look they are jumping’ (in the TV)].
-The child Anna said-
-/dim na/= (Not egg), when she didn’t want to eat eggs.
-/mamma alla/= (Mom is asleep). When anybody asked her about her mother, she replied
that; using ‘Allah’ in a rhythmic manner is a typical Bengali way of making the child sleep. (c) Early utterances (including sentences): The last level of utterance included in this category is the earliest form of sentence use.
As discussed in the former segment, we can see that the pre-sentence use of a child already takes the form of word combinations. At this stage sentences increase in lengths, but still, small connective words like ‘and’ or ‘the’ are left out and bigger words are simplified.
Thus this stage is also named-telegraphic stage’, as the language used here seem to take the form of a telegram, containing just enough information to make sense. Like-
– Child Simmi said-
-/bebi dudu k”abe /= (Baby wants to drink milk.) or
– The child Mro said-
-/apu gumai gese /= (Sister fell asleep.)
During this speech level, many three or four word sentences are also produced and child’s vocabulary expands (up to 13,000 words, according to research). Sometimes children begin to see the links between words and objects and therefore over-regularizations comes in (like incorporating plurals, joining words and attempts to use tenses). For example-
• Child Anna said-
C:/amrao jeccilam/= (We went also)
C:/amar mukgula bæta korce/= (My mouths are in pain)
Here the correct past form of the verb ‘to go’ had to be-/giyechilam/instead of-
/eccilam/. Moreover the plural form of mouth’ is /muk/ in Bengali, but the child used the plural form to indicate a single person’s mouth.
Early language use completely depends on the family and the child’s linguistic environment. Vocabularies, language form (dialect or standard), accent, contextual meaning of words and many other language components depend mainly on the use (Owens, 2012). This means, the child will learn the way he sees things.
For example Mro’s mother calls ‘noodles’ /ludus/, so the child says the same thing. Moreover, all of them call all the soft drinks (coke/pepsi/7 up/ sprite/fanta) as ‘coke’ only and classify them as ‘white’ (sprite/7up) and ‘black’ (coke/pepsi).
Thus Mro’s conception of soft drinks is much different and overgeneralized also. Thus, it can be assumed that early language acquisition and use depend on linguistic and surrounding environment of the child (except the universal grammatical features of a language). T
he child is bound to produce the language on the basis of the inputs he has received in the first few years of his life as it is his first language learning atmosphere.
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