Quick questions on Stages of spoken acquisition: from babbling to grammar - OCR A-Level English Language

The skill is inference, not labelling. Read the features across phonology, lexis and grammar, and argue which stage they place the child in, noting that a child may show features of more than one stage at a transition. Avoid guessing a precise age; the data shows a stage, and approximate ages are a guide, not the answer.

"The child's utterances ('daddy work', 'more milk', 'no go bed') are consistently two or three words long and retain only content words, omitting articles, auxiliaries and inflections, which places the child firmly in the telegraphic stage. The phonology supports an early profile too, with cluster reduction ('poon') and final-consonant deletion ('ca' for 'cat'). Together the grammatical and phonological evidence locates the child around the telegraphic stage, with no post-telegraphic function words yet present."

"The appearance of the plural inflection in 'two foots' is more revealing than a correct plural would be: the child has acquired the -s rule and over-applied it to an irregular noun, a virtuous error that marks the move into the post-telegraphic stage, where grammatical rules are being internalised and tested rather than items memorised." This reads a virtuous error as developmental evidence.

What characterises telegraphic speech? [2 marks]

Why should you not guess a child's exact age from a transcript? [2 marks]

Using a transcript, analyse the features of the child's language and what they suggest about their stage of development. [16 marks]