Steven Robinson

Children Transcript Analyses

English Lang

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BMT6BfxR7w

 

The argument is between two four year olds debating the issue of who said no first and who is older. The conversation starts off with the Boy arguing that he is right suggesting that he has the most power between them “No, I won’t ever!” he uses the Ellison “won’t” because he cannot structure his sentence properly yet Not only this but the conversation is very informal which shows that kids of the age of 4 and below cannot structure there conversation properly as they tend to have slight grammatical errors with their sentences. But at the same time they know what they are saying but cannot express it, having to wait to process what they’re going to say but haven’t learned how to semantically structure it properly “ If I say y… Yes! If I say no, then NO!” this is evidence from Chomsky theory LAD (‘language acquisition device’).

 

Both kids use a lot of high frequent lexis as they cannot express their points across to each other in turn leads to a loop of adjacency pairs “I say yes!” “I said no!” There are a lot of discourse markers and simple sentences throughout their argument however the four-year-old girl is able to use a few compound sentences to get her argument across “you be quiet, I’m four, you not four” but at the same time the sentences lack structure and tend to be in the past tense or said incorrectly with irregular verbs which refers back to B.F Skinners theory that kids tend to use a lot more irregular verbs at younger ages “Yeah am I FOUR! You…Much Young!”

 

Both children show signs of the telegraphic stage, making more sense to each other in the conversation however, they tend to mistake the odd noun and verb with a bit of a muddle on structure. They both can come to terms with future; past and present tense e.g. “Now you be quiet now!”. An other thing to note is that the boy says: “No you Dis-res-pecting!” now the boy is too young to come out with such a complicated word, this suggest that he had heard his parents saying it and he copied them supporting the view that you tend to copy your parents or older siblings grammar this supports B.F Skinner theory.

 

They use personal and singular pronouns throughout the entire transcript “I say yes!” This is evidence of Vigotski theory that children are self-centered in conversation. The transcript is constantly submerged in virtuous errors “if I say y...Yes! I say yes. If I say no, then NO! But at the same time both kids tend to use utterances. Referring back to Steve Pinkman theory on how children use words that they have learned from others both children must have learned how to formulate their words from others to get their point across “Be quiet!” “You be quiet!”