Abstract:
Research in the area of child language thrives on the availability of naturalistic language data. However, Indian endeavours are meagre and confined to the language data acquired by the Speech - Language Pathologists which is limited to the purview of their study. The present study is part of a post-doctoral work carried out at All India Institute of Speech and Hearing (AIISH). The study established a spoken language lexical corpus of children between the ages of 6 and 8 in Kannada language. The language data of 240 children, living in the city of Mysore was collected through description of standardised pictures, story narration and narration of daily activities of the child. The present paper looks into the use of markers by children while highlighting the need to encourage further research in the field of child language