This is my grandson, Oliver. He is now two years and three months old.Although he lives in England, my wife and I get to see him every week on Skype. Modern technology is splendid, as it allows us to watch our grandson growing up even though we are thousands of miles away.
Recently, my son has been recording Oliver's speech and putting the videos on Facebook. And then I can download them and investigate how he speaks. Over the last month or so, these are some of the words he has said, with my best efforts at transcribing his pronunciation:
Easter [i:tə]Most of these pronunciations are as expected. He simplifies consonant clusters, so the [fl] at the start of flower and the [bl] at the start of blanket get reduced to a single consonant, as does the [st] in the middle of Easter. Furthermore, he tends to drop final consonants, as in house and cup, though the sound at the end of egg is a bit surprising.
egg [eɪʃ]
flower [faʊwə]
house [haʊ]
blanket [bæni]
cow [kaʊ]
cup [kʌ]
One of the advantages of video recordings is that I can see what he is looking at when he is speaking, so I can (usually) work out what the words are. When I was doing my Masters research many eons ago, I recorded my son's speech (he was two at the time); but as I only had an audio tape-recorder, I had to transcribe the data quickly, or I would forget what he had been talking about.
In future, when I teach courses on language acquisition at UBD, I will use these videos of Oliver in class, as I believe this will enliven the material immensely. I hope, also, that those of you who have small children around (maybe nephews and nieces if you don't have your own children) will make the effort to record them. If you miss the chance, they will never be learning to speak again. The recordings can provide fantastic material for research on language acquisition, but if you miss the chance it is gone forever.
