While analysing the linguistic features within a transcript
between a five-year old girl and her father, I have categorised my findings
into four main frameworks; questions, pronouns, determiners and negatives.
These are aspects of language that children generally struggle with whilst
learning the English language, and so I have analysed these areas carefully.
However, in the specific transcript I am analysing, there are no negatives, and
I will evaluate why this is.
The first framework to focus on is the use of questions in
the grammatical structure; there are a significant amount of interrogatives
used by the father during the conversation, but very little used by the girl.
For example, the daughter says ‘some kids just love ducks’, and the father
replies, ‘just love the ducks?’ This is not only an example of questioning, but
also formulation. Formulation as an interrogative for a parent gives the child
an opportunity to think about what they have just said, decide if it is correct
and also show a high level of enthusiasm, which is needed for children around
five years of age. It is arguable that the reason the father uses more
interrogatives than the daughter is because he is guiding her to understand
that questions keep a conversation going, and creates adjacency pairs much more
fluent than a list of declaratives. Also, his questioning allows his daughter
to feel like she has the attention. Vegotsky, a theorist, suggested that
children are ego-centric and self-centred, meaning they love to have the
attention on them as they grow up. This could be for a number of reasons
including the need of interaction for learning. The fact that the father has
adopted the language of his daughter and begun to ask questions, reflects that
he subconsciously knows his daughter needs a lot of attention to be able to
learn. Another thing to note about the questioning framework is that the
fathers questions are to scaffold the daughter’s language and show her that certain
things she says are wrong, without being rude. For example, the father picks up
of the fact the daughter says ‘um’ very often in sentences as a non-verbal
filler, to allow her to think about the grammatical structure of the sentence
she is about to say. This can relate to Layoff’s theory that women use hedges
and fillers more often than men. For example; girl: um (.) we have computers.
Dad: ‘computers, and what else?’ He encourages her to stop using the word ‘um’
by asking a question, without that word- this will teach her that non-verbal
fillers are not always needed when we think. The girl seems to always reply
with ‘yeah’ after a corrective question, which indicates she is used to being
corrected a lot. Her use of the word ‘yeah’, however, leads to more questions
from the father. He also converges to her language by saying things like ‘so is
kindergarten like the coolest ever?’ adopting her language style encourages her
to communicate more and take more interest in the conversation.
As a five-year old, this girl is quite clear on her
pronouns. For example, she is able to use possessive pronouns correctly and use
the words ‘me’ ‘you’ ‘we’ ‘my’ ‘her’ etc. At five years old, this is something
all children should be pretty clear on, and the girl in this transcript clearly
is. This girl never uses a negative in this transcript- I could argue that this
is because the conversation structure is dad asking a question, and her
confirming it all the way through. Instead of mentioning things she doesn’t
like or doesn’t do, she mentions all the things she did do and the things she
did enjoy at kindergarten.
The last framework is determiners. Again, this girl is
fairly clear on the use of determiners, and is able to distinguish between
definite and indefinite articles, and possessives (as mentioned above). For
example, the girl says ‘let’s go to the ducks!’ this indicates the fact that
she is able to recognise that it’s an indefinite article, while maintaining her
simple lexis. She knows that there are multiple ducks, and so it is better to
say ‘the’ than ‘a’ (which would indicate there only being one duck). Her father
shows her she is correct by using a discourse marker and beginning a new topic.
Not only does this show her that what she previously said was correct and needs
no more acknowledgement, but it also demonstrates his power and ability to
drive the conversation. Not only does this girl show her language development
through advanced determiners, but she also reformulates her father’s language. For
example, she says ‘they may say’. This is fairly complex semantics and children
of the age of five generally do not use the word ‘may’ as a substitute for ‘might’.
This reflects her dad’s language and backs up BF Skinner’s theory that children
reformulate their parent’s language.
