"When was that...?" A study on the Acquisition of Temporal Adverbs in First Language Learners of British English

Abstract

The study is an exploratory study which, unlike any other study, investigates if there is an order of temporal adverb subcategory acquisition in first language learners of British English. It also investigates if temporal adverbs from the same subcategory are acquired at the same stage in development. A total of 20 participants ages 1 year 6 months to 5 years old were chosen from the CHILDES corpus. More specifically from "The Bristol Language Development Study: Language Development in Preschool Children" (Wells 1985). Data analysis involved searching for temporal adverbs using CLAN and recording their presence and frequency using Microsoft EXCEL. Several temporal adverbs were chosen to be analysed qualitatively within their conversation contexts. The results have indicated that there is an order of subcategory acquisition which goes as follows (in this order): definite, contrast, indefinite and frequency. Temporal adverbs from the manner subcategory were not present in this study. It was also found that temporal adverbs within the same subcategory were acquired at different ages.