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.
