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A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF THE PHONOLOGY OF CHILD LANGUAGE

ABSTRACT

Phonological variation most often focused on adult speakers of a particular language especially as it relates to variation in different dialects of a language. At times researchers focus on assessing the relatedness or otherwise of pronunciation patterns of second language learners in relation to the target language. The present study focuses on children’s language and assesses the different types of variation that are seen in children’s pattern in comparison with adult language. The study used the interview method for the collection of data from two year old girl and a two year boy over a period of one month. The findings of the study reveal that there were deletion of consonants, vowel sounds and syllables at the lexical levels. The study also reveals that there were instances of truncation in words that are relatively long. It also reveals that there were lots of innovative lexical items among the two children and all these resulted in these children having a pronunciation pattern that are relatively different from their adult speech patterns even as there were no noticeable difference in the prosodic features of tones assigned to these utterances. The researchers concludes that since these variations contextually do not distort the meaning inherent in those words/utterances, phonological variations in children language should be linked more on maturational process rather than seeing it as aggrammatical or being inferior to adult language.

KEYWORDS: Phonology, Child Language, Variation, Pronunciation

Dan Odinaka Abonyi

ERUDITE JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGES, VOL.6 NO.1