Interrogatives and Negatives
Children initially begin forming interrogatives by using phonology and changing their intonation, for example, “Dadda?” Within fifteen to eighteen months, they start to use question words, such as ‘where’ and ‘what,’ but only on their own.
In year two, children begin to combine question words with others to create more complex questions, such as “where car?” and, towards the third year, more words are added, so that the interrogatives become as complex as “what you doing in there?”
By the age of three, most problems have been overcome and children pick up auxiliary verbs (“Where Daddy going?” becomes “Where Daddy is going?”) and the Inversion Rule (“He is sad?” becomes “Is he sad?”) However, this rule does not always apply; we do not say “Went he to town?”
Children initially begin to express negatives using gesture and body language, but by eighteen months use negative holophrases such as “no” and “not.” At the age of two to two and a half, two-word sentences involving negatives are formed, such as “not there” and “running no,” and in year three they can be used in the middle of sentences to create more complex negative expression such as “You no do that.” The verbs ‘can’t,’ ‘won’t’ and ‘don’t’ also appear (“Me won’t do that”).
At around year four, negative words and endings begin to be used more accurately, with ‘n’t’ being used (“She isn’t going”) and ‘not’ replacing ‘no’ (“You’ve not got one”).
At the age of five, six and seven, subtle negatives like ‘hardly’ are picked up, and children begin to understand indirect refusal and denial such as “It’ll be tea time shortly” to mean “No, you can’t have a biscuit.”
Phonology
Children’s mastering of phonology develops much slower than comprehension; for example, a one year old child can recognise perhaps fifty words but pronounce only about three consonants and a vowel. A child’s own pronunciation, for instance, does not necessarily reflect what he knows about the adult sound system, and is perhaps quite different from what he thinks he is saying. In 1960, Berko and Brown found that a child may pronounce a word like ‘fish’ as “fis”, but actually think that they are pronouncing it correctly, and recognise the error when someone else pronounces it as “fis.”
Children begin with a restricted set of words and gradually increase their repertoire. However, they alter certain sounds and there are obvious patterns to this:
- Groups of consonants are avoided: “sky” = “gy,” “play” = “pey.” Consonant clusters are hard for young children to pronounce.
- Unstressed sounds or syllables are dropped: “banana” = “nana,” “cat” = “ca.” Children often ignore unemphasised parts of words.
- Sounds are made more like neighbouring ones: “yellow” = “lellow,” “bottle” = “bo bo.” It is simpler for children to reproduce other sounds in the word.
- Certain sounds are substituted for others: “red” = “wed,” “see” = “tee.” Children use alternative sounds when it is too hard to pronounce a certain one, or for sounds for which their speech needs to be better developed.
Reduplication is also heard around the second year. David Crystal has suggested that the repetition and simplified pronunciation in these words help children to recognise and learn them bit by bit. Children also replace new, difficult words with phonologically similar ones as a kind of stand-in whilst they are learning the correct one (“kitchens” for “chickens”). A child’s pronunciation of one word can vary from day-to-day or even hour-to-hour (“pen,” “pem,” “pun”).
Liz Cooper - A 22 year old media graduate from northern England, Liz now lives in London where she undertakes freelance television and writing work. A ...
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