engleski

Colour naming diversity in descriptions by younger school children

In the phase of language acquisition process that starts when a child reaches the first year of age and all the while to the third year when a child has gained command over the basics of the mother tongue, nouns and verbs are the most important parts of speech that children use in the process of communication. Language acquisition will depend on a number of factors: a child's gender, the number of children in the family, a child's environment, media he/she consumes, the way older members of the family speak to the child, attending kindergarten, parents' education and the organic idiom that a child is exposed to. At that early age a child names everything that surrounds him/her thus gaining knowledge about the world around them. Colours are a part of a child's world and after naming things and people, a child starts acquiring the names of primary colours. In the same way, if a child is learning a foreign language, one of the first impulses is to learn the names of the colours so the content of numerous cartoons intended for nursery school children is connected with colours. With time, a child expands his/her vocabulary acquiring new words, listening to stories and especially fairy tales that are rich with various adjectives and colour names in denotative and connotative meanings. It is interesting that children often use colours to describe people, exterior and interior space both in speaking and writing. Even though their knowledge about colours increases with age, in the active lexis there are very often only basic colours: blue, red, yellow, brown, black, white and green. Therefore it is the goal of this research to examine to what extent younger school children (7 to10- year- olds) use colours in their descriptions of people, exterior and interior space. The research will be of the experimental nature in the way that students will have a lesson of Croatian language (their mother tongue) in which the lexemes connected with colours will be activated using texts about colours and language play. Then students will write compositions in which active use of 'colours' in written expression will be tested. It is expected that students will use up to five basic colours in their work and a small number of different adjectives which implies that younger school children's vocabulary size is getting smaller despite numerous impulses that children today receive.

Croatian language, early language learning, name of colors, corpus linguistic

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