This 47th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.

Test Question—Child Words

Below is a representative sample of one child’s first words:

1. spaghetti [ˈɡeɡi]
2. ready [ˈwedi]
3. furry [ˈbʌbi]
4. juice [dut]

Explain whether you find any of these child renditions remarkable or unexpected in any way.

Answers

• The child simply needs to acquire new words to refer to things properly, although it is not a good idea to correct the child. This would only result in negative evidence.

• I would take the child forms as renditions. There is consonal assimilation.

• The child keeps stressed [e] and distressed [i].

• If there is a voiced consonant in the word, it becomes that consonant.

• He creates a stop [b] for ‘furry’, instead of the difficult half-open, half-closed mouth to create a fricative.

• The words are remarkable as the child is able to grasp the stressed syllable of any word.

• The child only replicates a word from its point of emphasis. From this arguement, I conclude that these are indeed child forms.

• It appears that the child understands the concept of syllabification in most of the words.

• In the data, /r/ becomes a glide /w/ in context-free processes. The strong-weak pattern is practised by the child. The approximant /j/ of ‘juice’ is stopped.

• The child tends to go through the gliding process. There is also an occurrence of stopping as in the case of word-final devoicing ‘juice’.

• [ˈɡeɡi] is unexpected because the child’s first consonants would not come from a velar stop.

• Most consonants are voiceless because of shortness of breath of the child.

• The background information of the child may help verify his scope of language and learning. It’s difficult to distinguish words when children mumble away like this.

More to come...

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