Language Development Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Language Development - Research Paper ExampleAt the age of four, a childs speech should be 100% intelligible with minimal absence or exchange of consonants or sounds (Sax & Weston, 2007). Ellas language is fully intelligible she uses phonological assimilation and elision as evidenced in her pronunciation of want to wnt tu as wanna wn, and going to g tu as gonna gn she also pronounces because bikz as cuz kz, and fails to pronounce the final consonant of yes js and says y. It also seems that Ella is not aware of the difference in pronunciation of k right off no and now na because when meaning know she said now. She is also able to use contractions as evidenced when she says Im aim rather than I am and thats ts instead of that is.2.2 MorphologyMorphology, together with phrase structure make up the grammar of a language. Morphology is concerned with how words are made up of smaller morphemes a morpheme is the minimal linguistic unit of a language that carries meaning (Silzer, 2005, p.1 01) and can be used to change the meanings of words. Prefixes, suffixes and affixes can be used and fall within two categories derivational (changes word class) and well-formed (changes grammatical meaning) (Pence & Justice, 2008). In Ellas language for example she proves to have acquired correct utilisation of the plural morpheme s as in cousins, friends and millions she also shows good usage of the inflectional grammatical morphemes ing for present continuous as in flying, finding and going sailing and past tense ed as in picked. All such morphemes are usually acquired before the age of four (Pence & Justice, 2008) and are in accordance with Browns (1973) syntactic stages III and IV.