A Psycholinguistic Study of the Language of Under-Five Users of English

This research is a psycholinguistic study of the language of Nigerian children under the age of five years. The purpose of this investigation is to explore the process through which the under-five children acquire and use language including their cognitive development. A review of related materials formed the basis of our procedure. Data was collected from informants through spontaneous speeches, personal interviews and oral tests. Two nursery schools provided the data for this study. They are Delta State University Staff School, Abraka and Awaike Primary School, Abraka. The theoretical framework adopted for this study is Chomsky’s Transformational Generative Grammar. Data collected was grouped and built into tables for analysis based on the hypotheses tested. The results of the analysis revealed that both innate and environmental factors are responsible for the acquisition of language by children under five years of age. The research, therefore, recommends that since language acquisition by children is greatly influenced by adults’ utterances, adults should be mindful of how words are pronounced since children learn by imitation.