An Investigation Into The Use Of Nouns By Four-Year-Olds During Play.
Introduction

In my investigation I will be looking at short extracts of the Channel Four TV show ‘The Secret Life of Four Year Olds’. This documentary followed ten Four Year Olds whilst they were at nursery. The nursery was specially equipped with cameras and microphones to capture the children’s speech development and social interactions.
By analysing the transcript I will be able to investigate the theory of Katherine Nelson who stated, through her research and by logging children’s early language, words used can be placed in one of four categories with around 60% of those words being ‘naming words’ or nouns. By counting the number of nouns in short clips I will be able to determine if this theory is plausible.
Theorist, Elizabeth Spelke said that of the nouns children know, the majority will be concrete nouns as they are logical and relate to objects they can see, hear, smell, feel and taste. By further exploring the types of nouns used by the children I aim to establish a link between both theories and see if they are still credible in today’s society.

Methodology

I am using an extract from ‘The Secret Life of Four Year Olds’, in order to use a non-biased selection. I will extract data to record the number of times in the running time of the programme the children use nouns compared to the number of words spoken. This quantitative approach will produce a solid basis from which I can further analyse the use of language in a statistical manner.
However, when finally analysing these results, as this form of data collection is not contextualised and therefore will not show any of the more subtle language used by children. I also intend to compare the types of nouns used as a qualitative comparison.
This investigation will help me conclude if Nelson and Spelke’s theories are correct, by seeing if nouns are the most common word class in children’s speech it will help to support Nelson’s theory, and the noun type will help to reinforce Spelke’s theory that concrete nouns are the most regular in children’s daily vocabulary.
As I will be using transcript from a TV programme I also intend to collect secondary data obtained by recording child’s language through a free play time in a Early Years setting and then looking into word class and type usage. As this secondary data will not contain any identifying information it is not necessary for me to consider ethical issues regarding confidentiality and the need for permission.
For my investigation I will be using the grammatical and morphological framework. This is the framework that looks into the words used in speech, and as I am looking at children’s speech this framework will fit well.
Analysis

I gained my date using frequency and transcript observation, both from a documentary and an input form an external setting. By interrogating my data I aim to establish whether Nelson’s theory that children’s early words are largely nouns, and Spelke’s subsequent theory that those nouns were concrete by greater proportion compared to abstract. By analysing the collection of data I will show how the impact of both qualitative and quantitative responses contribute to my final conclusions.

The validity of one aspect of my data capture was brought into question when an Email(appendix 1) was received from my secondary source stating that the children were significantly changing the way they spoke once the Dictaphone was identified, as a result of this I advised in order to protect the spontaneity of the collection whether staff would be able to manually record the nouns used and the number of other words in an utterance (appendix 2), as the children were used to be observed my staff in this way. By creating this form of Pareto analysis, with the limited time available this was the most effective way to achieve data capture.

Initially compiling the data from the transcript (appendix 3)I was able to produce data as below.

This compares the number of nouns and other word classes, in the individual extracts. The chart shows that both extracts eight and four produced a larger number of nouns when compared with all other extract ratios. During these extracts the children involved were totally absorbed in an activity and therefore it could be suggested more at ease with their speech, forgetting they were being watched and recorded. Extract six indicated a low use of nouns in comparison to other word classes, when interrogating data further (appendix 3) I was able to establish that this conversation was between two girls who were discussing the concept of play rather than actually playing, this could be due to them being aware of the cameras in the room, or exploring the social aspect of friendships with a limited range of language.

I was surprised to see the analysis of my data for each individual extract suggesting that Nelson’s theory appeared to be inaccurate. I was expecting to see the data reversed with the number of nouns used being significantly higher than the number of other words used.
Over the period of recorded extracts I was able to use fifteen minutes of children’s conversation and using this as a total rather then individual extracts was able to produce the pie chart as below, concluding that the children through speech produced twelve per cent nouns. This figure is considerably lower than the sixty per cent quoted in Nelson’s theory.

Analysing my secondary data source I started by totalling the data provided by the setting over a fifteen minute period of free play. This data was then transferred to produce the table as below.

Whilst the number of words produced by the children in the same timeframe was significantly higher when the secondary sources data was formatted in the same way as my primary source the percentage of nouns was exactly the same.

This has prevented me from recreating evidence to support Nelson’s theory, however, as the initial research and theory by Nelson was published in 1973 the theory is out dated and therefore is unlikely to still apply in todays society, with children having greater access to a wider range of language and social interaction, the growth of their vocabulary is far quicker than it used to be.

The second part of my investigation was to look at the comparison between the number of concrete nouns against the number of abstract nouns used as Spelke’s theory states children will use more concrete nouns as they are physical objects and therefore easier to understand what the thing is.

Data from the transcript when illustrated in a chart clearly shows a large percentage of the nouns used were concrete, when analysing the secondary data I was able to establish a similar pattern.

Whilst the use of seventy-seven nouns was recorded these only covered twenty six variations (appendix 2) and all bar one of these nouns were concrete, with an abstract noun being used on nine occasions. However, again the combined figures have produced similar percentage results, suggesting that Spelke’s theory is still relevant, although it was published in 1990 and therefore is possibly out dated, my investigation would suggest it is still relevant in today’s society.

Evaluation

Through my research I found that Nelson’s theory that children will use sixty per cent of nouns in their language when compared to other words, was inapplicable when tested on children in today’s society, however, the theory was published in 1973 and therefore is likely to be out dated, also, the sample of children used on the TV show was only a small sample, this means the findings aren’t generalizable to the target population.
Also, due to the children being aware of cameras and microphones in the room the experiment would lack ecological validity, this again would corrupt the findings. As this is not a child’s natural environment they are likely to act differently to how they would in their usual settings. Also the children involved in the programme didn’t know each other and were all from different back grounds, although this reduces the ethnocentricity it will also have an affect on the children because they would not be as comfortable around each other, making their language possibly forced.
The children in the setting would also be forming new friendships, as children may find this intimidating it would therefore make them less likely to be using nouns to form these friendships.
My secondary data came form a field experiment, the setting it was conducted in was the children’s usual setting with no digital recording devices, as the children are used to be observed by staff it was no different to what would usually happen, therefor increasing the ecological validity of my findings.
However, as the children are all from the local area the findings would be ethnocentric, but as the children are more comfortable around each other the speech would be free and less restricted than those from the first data set.
Due to free speech the results should support Nelson’s theory, however, the data reveals that both the speech of the children in data set one and data set two used the same percentage of nouns in their speech even though the total words used were different.
In order to improve the validity of my research I would increase the sample size as this would make it more generalizable and allow me to identify any anomalous results and discard them from my overall results, I could also use more episodes from the series ‘the secret life of four year olds’ so that more qualitative and quantitative data is gathered.
To gather this research I only used episode one from the TV show, by using more episodes I would have access to the children speech once they have developed relationships with the other children and friendships have been formed.
Conclusion
I set out on this investigation in order to explore the use of nouns in young children’s speech in relation to the theories of Nelson and Spelke. My analysis suggested a shift in the language used by children in the 21st contrary as a higher percentage of nouns were recorded in both my primary and secondary source. It was interesting to note although the evidence for the sources were collected independently using different subjects and settings that the concluding percentages were the same, however, as my investigation did not exactly replicate the conditions of the investigation by Nelson, my findings cannot be directly compared.
In contrast to this when looking at the secondary source results in consideration of Spelke’s theory a very clear pattern of a heightened use of concrete nouns through free play conversation can clearly be seen.
As suggested in my introduction my investigation was looking at the relevance of both these theories, and although Nelson’s appears to have significantly changed theses results would suggest that despite progression in children’s language acquisition. However, my findings did support Spelke’s theory that most of the nouns used by children would be concrete nouns. This shows that although society has changed in terms of norms and values the process of language acquisition for children is largely unchanged.
Whilst choosing to use extracts from a controlled television documentary this reduced the sample of language that I was able to record and in conclusion may have distorted my final analysis as my fifteen minute observation time was constructed of a number of smaller extracts in different situations and at different times.
I would conclude that the evidence created through my secondary source is more reflective of early years today and that the only way I may have improved my data collection would have been to obtain two sets of data from similar environments with similar age groups.