Anastasia Valkova
Kamyanets-Podilsky J.Ohienko National university
Scientific Supervisor: PhD Lytvyniuk O.M.
THE PECULARITIES OF CHILDREN’S SPEECH
The article deals with peculiarities of children’s speech. The theme is very topical as its investigation can help solve a lot of theoretical questions connected with the development of the languages and their teaching.
Keywords: omission, substitution, distortion, redublication, baby talk, mispronunciation.
The development of oral language is one of the child’s most natural – and impressive – accomplishments. Almost all children learn the rules of their language at an early age through use, and over time, without formal instruction. Thus one source for learning must be genetic. Humans beings are born to speak; they have an innate gift for figuring out the rules of the language used in their environment. The environment itself is also a significant factor. Children learn the specific variety of language (dialect) that the important people around them speak.
Children’s speech is a peculiar stage in the development of young children. It attracts attention of linguists, psychologists, sociologists and other scientists who work in the field of the humanities. They are T.M. Ushakova, S.N. Ceytlin, Charles Ferguson, K.L. Krutiy, O.J. Moiseyenko, O.O. Rulyov and others. We can prove our theoretical investigations by the examples from Lewis Carroll’s book “Sylvia and Bruno” as well as by video recordings of the children’s speech. The results of the investigation can be applied at the lessons of the English Language and Translation Practice.
Children do not, however, learn only by imitating those around them. We know that children work through linguistic rules on their own because they use forms that adults never use, such as “I goed there before” or “I see your feets.” Children eventually learn the conventional forms, “went” and “feet”, as they sort out for themselves the exceptions to the rules of English syntax. As with learning to walk, learning to talk requires time for development and practice in everyday situations. Constant correction of a child’s speech is usually unproductive [4].
Oral language, the complex system that relates sounds to meanings, is made up of three components: the phonological, semantic, and syntactic. The phonological component involves the rules for combining sounds. The semantic component is made up of morphemes, the smallest units of meaning that may be combined with each other to make up words. The syntactic component consists of the rules that enable us to combine morphemes into sentences. From combining two morphemes, the child goes on to combine words with suffixes or inflections (“-s” or “-ing”, as in “papers” and “eating”) and eventually creates questions, statements, commands, etc [1].
Some language experts would add a fourth component: pragmatics, which deals with rules of language use. Pragmatic rules are part of our communicative competence, our ability to speak appropriately in different situations, for example, in a conversational way at home and in a more formal way at a job interview. Young children need to learn the ways of speaking in the day care center or school where, for example, teachers often ask rhetorical questions. Learning pragmatic rules is as important as learning the rules of the other components of language since people are perceived and judged based on both what they say and how and when they say it. Many very young children mispronounce sounds, syllables, and words. Words mispronounced by young children sound cute [3].
Most errors fall into one of three categories – omissions, substitutions, or distortions. An example of an omission is “at” for “hat” or “oo” for “shoe.” An example of a substitution is the use of “w” for “r.” which makes “rabbit” sound like “wabbit,” or the substitution of “th” for “s” so that “sun” is pronounced “thun.” When the sound is said inaccurately, but sounds something like the intended sound, it is called a distortion. Sounds are learned in an orderly sequence. Some sounds, such as “p,” “m,” and “b,” are learned as early as 3 years of age. Other sounds, like “s,” “r” and “l”, often are not completely mastered until the early school years.
Sometimes the difficulty in pronunciation has less to do with a particular letter sound than with the organization of the word itself. For example, your child may say “Dadda” or “Daddy”, so you know he can make a “d” sound, yet he pronounces “dog” as “gog” [5, c. 11].
So, some of the most common language challenges that young children have are not pronouncing certain sounds clearly; mispronouncing words; using a sentence structure that omits certain parts of speech or substituting a word like “thingy” or grunting when they don’t know a word, omitting pronouns and prepositions (“Me go play”) .
Since children employ a wide variety of phonological and morphological simplifications (usually distance assimilation or reduplication) in learning speech, such interaction results in the “classic” baby-words like na-na for grandmother or din-din for dinner, where the child seizes on a stressed syllable of the input, and simply repeats it to form a word.
As it has just been mentioned, reduplication is wide-spread in making these words, for example: “boo-boo” (“вава”), “yum-yum” (“ням-ням”), “pee-pee” (“пі-пі”). May be, reduplication is typical of cildren’s speech in the whole world.
Young children use in their speech names of relatives, food, parts of body, some qualities such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘big’, ‘little’ etc, names of animals, birds, children’s games. As for parts of speech, children mostly use nouns and they may omit link-verb to be, for example “dollie pretty” instead of “the doll is pretty”. And it’s well known that children very often create new words mostly by analogy.
One should differentiate between children’s language acquisition and baby talk (also referred to as caretaker speech, infant-directed talk or child-directed speech and informally as “motherese”, “parentese”, or “mommy talk”). Baby talk is a nonstandard form of speech used by adults in talking to toddlers and infants. It is usually delivered with a “cooing” pattern of intonation different from that of normal adult speech and is characterized by the shortening and simplifying of words. Baby talk is also used by people when talking to their pets, and between adults as a form of affection, intimacy, bullying or condescension.
Many words can be derived into baby talk following certain rules of transformation, in English adding a terminal [i] sound is a common way to form a diminutive which is used as part of baby talk, examples include: horsey (from horse), kitty (from cat or kitten), doggie, birdie, dollie [2].
In the Ukrainian language diminishing suffixes are also used in the speech of children and adults speaking to children. For example: “їстоньки”, “спатки”, “ніжка”, “ніжечка”.
We can watch such interesting notions not only oral speech but also in written form. Lewis Carroll’s book “Sylvia and Bruno” shows us a lot of examples of children’s speech.
One of the main characters of the book is a little boy Bruno. His speech is full of phonological and grammatical errors. He can also create some words what is typical if young children when they don’t understand something.
Having analyzed Part 1 of the book we can make the conclusion that Bruno makes the following grammatical mistakes:
- uses wrong forms of the verb to be (I is, He are);
- double negation;
- wrong forms of irregular verbs;
- wrong tense forms etc.
Bruno also mispronounces some sounds such as [j], [θ], [ð]. To see how the little boy’s speech was rendered in translation we analyzed Russian translation of the book done by А. Moskotelnykov.
As for dialects, for example, many scientists (A. Fedorov, A.P. Chujakin) state that dialect words in the source language text shouldn’t be translated by dialect words in the target language text. May be the same approach can be applied to children’s speech. Still we think that it’s possible to show that the child is speaking incorrectly by means of making some phonological and grammatical mistakes in Ukrainian translation because we know which sounds are difficult for children and which grammar rules are not always observed (usually declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, conjugation of verbs, gender of nouns etc).
References
- Бодуэн де Куртене И.А. Избранные труды по общему языкознанию: В 2 т. / И.А. Бодуэн де Куртене. – М.: АПН СССР, 1963. – Т. 1. – 311 c.
- Гвоздев А.Н. От первых слов до первого класса: Дневник научных наблюдений / А.Н. Гвоздев. – Саратов: СГУ, 1981. – 323 с.
- Моісеєнко О.Ю. Дискурсно-прагматичні особливості дитячого мовлення (на матеріалі сучасної англійської мови). Автореф. дис. канд. філол. наук: 10.02.04 / Київський ун-т ім. Тараса Шевченка / О.Ю. Моісеєнко. – К., 1999. – 20 c.
- Фергюсон Чарлз. Автономная детская речь в шести языках [ Електронний ресурс ] / Фергюсон Чарлз. – Режим доступу: classes.ru/grammar/154.new-in-linguistics-7/source
Цейтлин С.Н. Онтолингвистика [ Електронний ресурс ] / С.Н. Цейтлин. – Режим доступу: ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/