Analysis of Fran and Sophie

At 28 months, Sophie has reached the telegraphic stage of language acquisition and now will have learnt up to 200 words and is producing utterances of up to four words. This is very impressive for a child who is two years old as they have accomplished so much in such a ,;short space of time. Through analysis of the transcript of Sophie and her mother Fran we are able to identify the features of language that Sophie has conquered so far at this stage in her life. For example, the first utterance, “mummy-come on floor me”, this sentence can be understood and Fran can work out what Sophie is implying. In reference to Halliday’s theory, this utterance would be classed as a regulatory sentence as Sophie is trying to influence her mother's actions. However it is clear that there are some elements of speech which the child hasn't mastered yet. For example, the word order is mixed up as the sentence should be, “mummy- sit on the floor with me”, this indicated that Sophie know what she is trying to say but has trouble with some function words such as the verb “come” which is confused with “sit”. However, this may be due to the fact that the child simply cannot produce the “S” sound and so chooses a word she is capable is saying, this would support the theory that understanding is acquired much sooner than the ability to produce the sounds.
In extract one Sophie produces the utterance, “Muffy step on that” here the child uses the incorrect tense and says the verb “step” in the present tense rather than “stepped “in the past tense. We can also see links to Halliday's theory as she personifies her favourite toy, “Muffy” and gives it human characteristics showing that she has the ability to use her imagination to produce language which supports Chomsky's theory that language is innate and children can be creative and produce sentences that they have never heard before rather than just imitating their parents. At 2 years and 4 months, we are able to see the word classes that Sophie uses correctly and incorrectly, for example when she says, “me want daddy come down” . Here we can see that Sophie uses the incorrect the object pronoun “me” instead of the correct subject pronoun “I”. Sophie also misses out the proposition “to” from her utterance. This may be because at the telegraphic stage, children tend to use lexical words to convey meaning rather than grammatical words which are not completely necessary to get their point across. However, Sophie uses the correct future tense in this utterance which shows that she has a grasp of time.
In extract 2 at 36 months, Sophie has moved into the post-telegraphic stage and has made rapid progress in 8 months and is now producing utterances of over five words. Although the child is able to string together longer sentences, there are still some elements of language that she has not yet grasped. For example in the utterance, “mm - me did good – me did some of those mummy” this utterance is almost perfect in comparison to the sentences produced at 28 months. The only mistake that Sophie makes here is that she uses the wrong personal pronouns and uses “me” in mistake of “I”. At this stage Sophie has learnt a range of pragmatic skills and is beginning to understand the features of unspoken language and demonstrates her knowledge of turn-taking by asking and answering questions and taking turns. This is an indication that the child is moving from early speech to more adult speech.

Sophie at 3 years and 5 months is still in the post-telegraphic stage and many of the utterances that she produces are almost perfect. For example the interrogative, “is it dark outside?” This makes perfect grammatical sense and Sophie has managed to correctly invert the subject and the verb. However, at this stage it is clear that the main problem that Sophie has is using pronouns correctly, this is apparent in many of her utterances at this age. For example the sentence, “want