Analysis of children talking together transcript

   In my previous post you can see that Emily and Ollie are picking up words from their mum and the other conversational participant, Lucy, really easily. Both of these children are clearly from the telegraphic stage judging by their lack of using determiners, pronouns, negatives and interrogatives. Even by looking at solely the language used by these two children in conversation with adults you can tell that Emily and Ollie are about two and a half to three years old. For instance the abundance of repetition that is involved in the whole conversation is huge; Emily seems to be copying almost everything that her mum or Lucy say to try and either grasp the meaning of it or to just continue the adjacency pairs, which are practically all imperatives used by the adults and empty repetition from the children, so that the conversation flows (as she must have previously learnt that it needs to). This can relate to Wolfgang Enard's research which was conducted which shows how children's brains are hardwired for understanding and learning language as they are encouraged by their carers and the people around them that they interact with. Something to back up Enard's research is the FOX P2 gene, which is the gene that has been discovered that supports Chomsky's nature over nurture theory, wherein the human brain is ready for language but just needs to be continually stimulated so that the child can gain the ability to speak whatever language they are taught by their carer or from the environment that they are living in.

   Emily can be clearly identified as the younger sibling as she repeats certain nouns, for example when she wants her mum to go away she says, "mummy go away" a couple of times and then moves on to "outside (.) go outside". Then further on in the conversation she seems to just say "side" instead of "outside" which indicates that she has omitted the prefix "out", which shows that she clearly doesn't understand the syntactical development and of words in a sentence. The first utterance that she repeats is "fire hot (.) fire hot" which is completely out of context, but is forgiven because she is probably only three years old. She's missed out the third person verb "is" from this utterance; therefore it can't be classed as a sentence because it is incomplete. As the conversation progresses you can see that in all the times that she repeats something that an adult has said, she doesn't said "is" once, proving that she must be in the telegraphic stage of language development and lacks the syntactical development to construct proper sentences.
   Their mum, Lucy and their dad together all use a lot of imperatives to instruct the children with what to do, but more towards the end of the conversation the mum is scaffolding Emily's language to encourage her to talk and respond correctly. At the beginning of the transcript the adults are correcting the children, then they move to telling them what to do and gradually move from that to the scaffolding of the children's language in an attempt to encourage Emily to keep on track with the conversation as she kept getting distracted and going completely off topic, and to also lead by example and use standard correct English to hopefully be copied by her as she had done previously.