THE LANGUAGE OF THREE‐ TO FIVE‐YEAR‐OLDS IN PRE‐SCHOOL EDUCATION

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Abstract
A sample of spontaneous speech by unselected children engaged in normal nursery activities was examined for developmental features, and for the effect on language of different interpersonal situations. Using a unit of measurement based on the length of the major clause, the predicate unit, an analysis of the sample showed that length of clause was associated closely with increasing age but insignificantly with socio‐economic status. A second measure, utterance length, was used to measure communication flow and this showed that certain adult‐dominated conversational styles which reduced the child to a respondent position, markedly restricted the length of the child's utterances, while other types of adult/child communication facilitated fluent speech. Although immature constructions appeared in a decreasing proportion of the predicate units of children from all backgrounds as the age of the children advanced, colloquial omission of subject and verb auxiliary persisted more strongly in the speech of working‐class children and this might cause some initial difficulty in learning to read and write the extended form of standardized English text which would be alien to their normal speech in many of the commonest constructions.

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