Children’s view on language

Abstract

The study proposes a linguistic analysis of children’s utterances with regard to their (linguistic and metalinguistics) reflection on the language they acquire. The aim of the analysis is to find out at what level and in what aspects children observe speech and how they talk about language. Metalinguistic reflection has been a subject of psychological research but there is little such reflection from the linguistic perspective relating to children. Psychologists are divided on the issue of (meta)linguistic awareness, therefore the assumption can be made that for linguistic behaviour to be considered metalinguistic it must be performed consciously, it must involve reflective thinking, and the intention to control one’s actions.

 The empirical part of the study, i.e., an analysis of a corpus of children’s reflective utterances about language, has led to the following conclusions: children think of what and how they say, they analyse their own utterances and those of others. Their reflective thinking functions at various levels of linguistic organization: phonological, lexical, syntactic, morphological. They pay attention to collocations, identify registers and lexis-based styles, play with words and their meanings. Without a conceptual framework at their disposal, they can devise their own.