CHILD'S PRONUNCIATION

Child's pronunciation





Child's pronunciation

Question One

Children do not use language like adults, because children are not adults. Acquiring language is a gradual, lengthy process, and one that involves a lot of apparent 'errors'. We will see below that these 'errors' are in fact not errors at all, but a necessary part of the process of language acquisition. That is, they shouldn't be corrected, because they will disappear in time. Children will learn to speak the dialect(s) and language(s) that are used around them(Clark, 2009). Children usually begin by speaking like their parents or caregivers, but once they start to mix with other children (especially from the age of about 3 years) they start to speak like friends their own age. You cannot control the way your children speak: they will develop their own accents and they will learn the languages they think they need(Clark, 2009). A child will also learn the local grammar: 'He done it'; 'She never go there'; 'My brother happy' and so on are all examples of non-standard grammar found in some places where English is spoken. These might be judged wrong in school contexts (and all children will have to learn the standard version in school) but if adults in the child's community use them, they are not 'wrong' in child language(Clark, 2009). Children do not simply reproduce as-is whatever they are exposed to, for two reasons: First, they are developing physically. Just as it may take years to be able to develop the fine motor skills needed for sewing on a button, it will take years to be able to use speech organs in equally precise ways. Second, children are developing cognitively(O'Grady, 2005).

They need to find ways to make sense of their environment, so that they can engage comfortably with it. They do this by progressively adapting the input they receive to their own emerging cognitive and linguistic abilities, and by screening out, as it were, what is as yet too complex for them to understand(O'Grady, 2005). Let's see why this difference between physical and cognitive ability matters for child language acquisition. The child recognizes that the pronunciation 'fis' is not up to par, but cannot reproduce the adult target 'fish'. That is, the language item 'fish', complete with target pronunciation, is clear to the child, but speech production doesn't match this awareness. Children of deaf parents give us further proof of the difference between these two abilities: if these children are exposed to a sign language early in life, they will develop that language whether they are deaf or hearing, even though they might not use it(Bruner, 1980). The 'fis-phenomenon' is what explains why children can get very angry at someone who repeats their own baby productions back to them, whether in pronunciation or in grammar. Since speech and language are independent abilities, emerging language does not reflect emerging speech in any straightforward way, or vice versa. There's nothing necessarily wrong with someone's language abilities if they stutter, lisp or slur their ...