CHARACTERISTICS OF CHILDREN’S SPONTANEOUS SPEECH
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to reveal the characteristics of children’s language usage, with particular attention to the composition of their vocabulary, with the help of corpus linguistic investigations, such as word frequency and keyword analyses. The KorSzak Children’s Language Corpus, which is the basis of the present research, is a dynamic corpus for pedagogical purposes currently consisting of 73 recordings of twenty-seven children aged 11-15. During the video and audio recordings, the children-informants talk freely about particular topics (e.g. animals, leisure activities) in pairs or small groups. The current research presents, in detail, the informants’ most frequently used words, classifying them into word classes and lexical units associated with them and examining their lexico-grammatical patterns. The application of the investigation’s findings in language education will be discussed as an outlook of the presentation.
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