Psycholinguistic study on social speech in children’s early communication

ABDTRACT

The study of how children leam speak is one of the most fascinating, important, and complicated branches of language study in recent years. The fascinating of the subject stems from the natural interest people take in the developing abilities of yoimg children. Language is an important tool in understanding social-emotional development. This study analyze،' the psycholinguistic phenomenon on social speech ability on children’s early communication. Learning social speech as early as possible is important for children to become good communicators in their future life. Most parents hope their children develop their communication skill especially the social speech in their everyday life to build their social attitude.

Children, in social speech, adjust to the person speaking to them. This phenomenon occurs if most children are able to view situations from others’ point of view than from their own point of view and then they are able to communicate and involve in an exchange of ideas. Children leam the form of communication, some of the pragmatics aspects of language, how language is used, how conversation flows, and what rules are necessary to keep conversations going. Children obtain the first rules of communication from their parents. Therefore, they fully leam their parents’ teaching and apply their own utterances by using trial and error method.

This study uses qualitative descriptive method in order to know the social speech ability of children at the age 2.0 to 3.0 years old. Technique of data collection used here is recording the children’s spontaneous utterance when they are making conversation with other people and the researcher. Some theories on psycholinguistics and pragmatics related and suitable to this phenomenon are used in analyzing the data.

The acquisition of social speech in children is very much influenced by mothers. The social speech ability can be accomplished within the communication with other people. Mothers teach children how to satisfy other people by giving expected answers or utterances. Children leam to deal with the Politeness Principle which has six maxims accompanied by elicitation given by the mothers. The children of this study are taught by their parents, especially their mothers, to tolerate other people when they are talking. This treatment results in the children’s capacity to communicate socially to other people even though only for a relatively short time.