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

Language Development - Research Paper Example At the age of four, a child’s speech should be 100% intelligible with minimal absence or exchange of consonants or sounds (Sax & Weston, 2007). Ella’s language is fully comprehensible; she uses phonological assimilation and elision as evidenced in her pronunciation of ‘want to’ [wÉ’nt tu] as ‘wanna’ [wÉ’nÃ"â„¢], and ‘going to’ [gÃ"™ÊŠÉ ªÃ…‹ tu] as ‘gonna’ [gÉ’nÃ"â„¢]; she also pronounces ‘because’ [bikÉ’z] as ‘cuz’ [kÊÅ'z], and fails to pronounce the final consonant of ‘yes’ [jÉ›s] and says [yÉ›Ã"â„¢]. It also seems that Ella is not aware of the difference in pronunciation of ‘know’ [noÊŠ] and ‘now’ [naÊŠ] because when meaning ‘know’ she said ‘now’. She is also able to use contractions as evidenced when she says ‘I’m’ [aim] rather than â€Å"I am’ and ‘that’sà ¢â‚¬â„¢ [É µÃƒ ¦ts] instead of ‘that is’.2.2   Morphology  Morphology, together with syntax make up the grammar of a language. Morphology is concerned with how words are made up of smaller morphemes; a morpheme is the â€Å"minimal linguistic unit of a language that carries meaning (Silzer, 2005, p.101) 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 grammatical (changes grammatical meaning) (Pence & Justice, 2008). In Ella’s language for example she proves to have acquired correct usage 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 ‘edâ€℠¢ as in ‘picked’. All such morphemes are usually acquired before the age of four (Pence & Justice, 2008) and are in accordance with Brown’s (1973) syntactic stages III and IV.