Using an American TV Program as a Data Source for Analyzing Children's Language Development

Abstract

This is a pilot study trying to see if a corpus can be effectively used to see children's language development. A corpus of language samples of a child named Michelle Tanner, a character from an American TV show Full House was compiled and put into analysis to examine her language development over a period of eight years. Her language samples were analyzed using corpus software, AntConc (Anthony, 2011) from the viewpoints of such developmental indicators as frequently used words, average sentence length, "be" verbs, future tense, present perfect tense, as well as "I" clusters, "you" clusters, and "if" clauses. The data showed a certain acquisition order of English syntax/grammar in Michelle's language development over the eight years, and this exploration revealed that a corpus can be an effective tool to analyze children's language development.