Conclusion/ Evaluation

During the process of 8 months much of what I had investigated represents a

substantial learning curve in terms of language acquisition. The question I set out
to study looks at how children develop out of the telegraphic stage of acquiring
language. My main problem however was finding a child who I believed to have
developed out of this stage. I decided to record an infant who had the nearest
age to 3, as theoretically this is where we should see a major development.
Having recorded a child at the age 2:8 I realised that there really isn’t a set
bracket or guideline for children to suddenly develop, it is more based on factors
that will be too long to list.

David crystal noted that at year 2, children are linguistic toddlers. During the
course of my investigation I believe this theory to be true to an extent. The
problem I feel is the ‘frameworks’ that development is catergorised under as like
any investigation there are bound to be outliers. In my case these where
represented by features of adult language, which ran through both recordings at
the ages 2:0 and 2:8 and prove that children imitate there parents to build upon
there own lexicon. At age 3, children are known to be linguistic analysts, being
full of argument and questions. I believe my investigation reinforces this as my
discovery highlights development of fluency and sophistication during the age of
2:8, which is remarkably improved in comparison to the recording made at 2:0.

If I where to enhance my data I would of instead opted to produce video

recordings instead of sound recordings. The reason purely lies in paralinguistic
features, it is said that 93% of what we say is through body language and I feel I
have missed out on this in my investigation, however within my study I noted a
feature of paralinguistic’s but this could of been elaborated with the assistance of
a video.
 Name: Ricken Ram
Candidate number: 3489
Lutterworth College

How does the

telegraphic stage of
language acquisition
develop further?