Aspects of the language of Maltese five year olds

Abstract

The work which I am presenting is exploratory in nature. It sets out to study the language of a group of five year old Maltese children. It is an attempt to determine some of the patterns that characterize their language. I include some information on the children's back ground by way of introduction. This is followed by a grammatical description of the adult language for the categories studied, i.e. Number and Possession. The rest of the study is devoted to the analysis of the children's responses for these categories. The work is concluded with a study of the composition of the children's utterances in terms of Maltese and English.