COMPARISON OF ZACH TRANSCRIPTS:

Over the course of 13 months we can see a clear difference between the language use by Z and a number of theories could be used to explain this development. In the first transcript (drawing a banana), Z has a mean length utterance of around 5 morphemes. This suggests he is in the later multimorpheme stage of development that involves utterances forming based on local topics and items within close proximity to them. This is displayed in the transcript many times as Z talks about his ‘little pad’ as well as what ‘Daddy’ has for dinner. The conversation between H and Z takes on a question and answer approach, mainly focused on closed questions that evoke short answers such as ‘what have you eaten today?’ ‘bananas’. Open questions rarely feature throughout the transcript as Z is carrying out an activity and therefore interrogatives from H are based on that activity. For example: ‘you think it goes there?’, ‘where is your little pad?’. This will impact Z’s mean length of utterance as the typical response to a closed question is between 2 and 4 morphemes. Therefore, based on the context of the transcript, Z’s language use is limited and not every aspect of his linguistic ability have been given an opportunity to be displayed.

                         

In the second transcript, which is 13 months on, the mean length of utterance is 6.3. This indicates a development but due to the structural features of what Z says, he doesn’t move out of the later multimorpheme stage. This transcript is full of longer utterances giving a commentary on what Z is doing, however many false starts occur and the utterances are more of a stream of consciousness rather than fully calculated and functioning sentences. For example: Z says ‘an I’m sitting here (.) to (.) for waiting (.) to get (0.5) better (.) for it (0.5)’ and although we understand what Z means as we have background knowledge of the context, this sentence is very disjointed and not fully operative. In spite of this, Z is unwell and most likely distracted from his train of thought and this reflects in his speech. In terms of lexis, Z uses non-standard language throughout the text. In reference to the cardboard robot he is building, Z says ‘it got lots of hurt all the way down’. The use of the word ‘hurt’ in replacement of a word for ‘injuries’ is again a common trait used by children; which is typically evolved from when they’ve learned what it means to hurt themselves and then they over generalise this rule and use it as an adjective. This overgeneralisation could be explained by Chomsky’s language acquisition device (LAD). Chomsky said that children are hard-wired with a perception of syntax and word order and that they learn language rules via watching others talk. This explains mistakes such as adding the suffix –ed to all verbs although it isn’t always correct. (Eg: ‘walk’ becomes ‘walked’, but ‘run’ becomes ‘ran’ and not ‘runned’. According to Chomsky, Z has developed an understanding for the use of the dynamic verb hurt based on the way the verb cut can be used as an adjective.

The grammatical content of all the utterances in each transcript is mainly correct with some pronunciation issues. The phoneme ‘th’ (θ – the voiceless dental fricative) is incorrectly pronounced by Z ‘frough’ instead of ‘through’ and ‘fings’ instead of ‘things’. This is a commonly made mistake by children up to the age of 8 years old and the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives are typically the last phoneme learnt. This error is corrected through modelling and support from the parent. This is evident in the transcript as H repeats what Z has just said but in the correct way, in an attempt to reinforce the correct pronunciation. This supports Lev Vygotsky’s theory the ‘zone of proximal development’. Vygotsky views interaction with able people as the best way to aid learning. The modelling shown in the transcript displays this perfectly as whenever Z is struggling with a word or phrasing, H repeats it back to him the right way and she only does this when there’s an issue. This method is very effective as it gives the learner help when they seek it and doesn’t spoon feed them too much. In the second transcript, the support (or scaffolding) is required a lot more but not it isn’t used in the same way. Modelling features a lot less in the robot transcript and instead H guides what Z is saying by paraphrasing and then asking ‘is that what you’re saying?’ or ‘it’s gotta take some time to heal, has it?’. This method pushes the conversation along and gives encouragement but doesn’t provide a direct correction for Z to learn from meaning he may not be benefitting or learning much about language from this technique.

According to Piaget, children between the ages of 1 and 6 years old are in the preoperational stage of development and rely on role play to learn as they haven’t developed a logical mind yet. Z adheres to this rule as the whole of the second transcript is a role play/game and the language featured in it supports this. Throughout the text, Z uses declaratives to inform H of what he wants to do and how the ‘robot’ is doing. This is typical of a child at this stage according to Piaget as they haven’t developed an understanding of how things look from another person’s point of view and so Z feels the need to explain everything he is doing. The repetition and emphasis of ‘wait an wait an wait’ is also evidence for Z being in this stage as he feels the need to exaggerate what he is talking about so that others understand. It’s unlikely that Z – at his age – would be able to use repetition as a rhetorical device as this is very complex and beyond the multimorpheme stage. This idea of egocentrism is applicable to child cognition and thus it impacts on the child’s language choices.