Analysis

TRANSCRIPT ANALYSIS – Judah and Mahri

The conversation starts with an adaption of his dad’s speech into a question, for example: ‘heres Mahri’ .. ‘Is it Mahri’. The ability for the 3 year old to understand and reform his dad’s speech shows that he has not only the mental ability but also the spoken ability to do this. Both children also show tendencies to stutter words in groups of 2 or 3, maybe used to create time to think and produce what they mean to say without the other child interrupting. ‘that that’, ‘far far’ and ‘we we we’ are all used in the same sentence by Mahri when she tries to say that the park is far away. This repetition is consistent through the transcript from both genders which suggests it’s an overall trait of the age. Another analytical feature that shows that these children are in the Post-Telegraphic stage of learning is the abundance of coordinating conjunctions ‘and’ to combine two small sentences that in previous stages would remain separate and make their language look simpler. Judah in particular in this transcript shows he struggles with the consonant cluster ‘th’ in ‘there. On several occasions he uses the consonant ‘d’ instead which is brought back from his first words where a consonant vowel cluster is easier to produce. ‘dere’ is used instead which is still understood by Mahri who replies with a simple ‘ok’. Here, Mahri shows signs of not biding by Grice’s Maxims as in the adjacency pairs she responds twice with ‘Ok’. The one word response does not provide enough information for Judah to reply to, however, may be due to gender differences, Judah carries the conversation on speaking more.