SPAA 270 Language Analysis

Throughout this semester, SPAA 270 students have learned about five components of language. These components of language will be the focus of my language analysis on Ashlyn, a nine-year-old girl, who is in a regular education classroom. It is significant to recognize and understand if a child is on track with their speech at a young age in order to prevent future complications. After communicating with Ashlyn for over forty minutes, I can easily analyze her speech and decide if the speech is normal for her age. The five components of speech that I studied include syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics and these are all significant in analyzing a child’s use of language. First, syntax is when an individual uses grammar to

Specifically, an individual tends to add small units to words in order to improve messages and stress the order of words in a sentence. Although the Linguisystem’s document does not show how a nine-year-old should sound, Ashlyn meets and goes beyond the guidelines of all of the other ages listed (Flahive, 2012). Ashlyn does a great job of making certain words plural, past tense, and using contractions. According to the transcript, she uses the correct ending to words and the correct form of the words as well. Ashlyn seems to use morphemes appropriately and her morphology can be considered normal for a

Semantics could be viewed when Ashlyn explained the rules of SkipBo to me, but the difficulty with her speech consisted mainly of her repetition of words. Overall, Ashlyn did an incredible job of always placing her words in the correct order for me to understand what she was trying to explain. Due to Ashlyn’s ability to explain the game without correcting words and putting the wrong words in front of one another, her semantics can be seen as normal. When we played the headbanz game, Ashlyn’s use of semantics could be seen because she recognized specific words for their appropriate