GASPRO International Journal of Eminent Scholars

ABSTRACT

Language is a purely human activity for the communication of ideas, feelings, emotions, desires, etc. through a commonly agreed upon symbol. The symbol can be speech, gestures, etc. There are six levels of language analysis; phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. This work investigated the morpho-semantic analysis of the speech of 2 to 5 years old children acquiring Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin respectively. It also investigated if these children can properly assign meaning to the words and at what stage they do this as well as the noticeable differences between the speech of 2 and 3-year-old and 3and 5-year-old children. To achieve these, the author made use of self-designed wordlist of 20 words. This wordlist was presented in form of interview to 6 children – 3 for Igbo and 3 for Nigerian Pidgin. Based on these, the findings showed that the children acquiring Nigerian Pidgin produce the final consonant as in /bɛtɪ/ although in a distorted manner. Also, the alveolar lateral [l] is replaced with [j] after the close-mid vowel has been added to break the consonants cluster. Also, there are observable differences in the speech of 2 years’ children acquiring language when compared with that of 3 and 5 years’ children acquiring Igbo and Pidgin respectively and children from 2 to 5 years’ attach meaning to lexical items, although at varying degrees.