A Phonological Analysis Of Favorite Nursery Rhymes From Mother Goose

For centuries, nursery rhymes have been chanted and delighted by young children all over the world and have become an indispensable part of their childhood. This paper intends to find out the irreplaceable value of nursery rhymes in young children’s spoken language development, based on the comparative study of the phonological features of the language of nursery rhymes and the features of English-speaking children’s acquisition of phonology.The second chapter summarizes the features of English-speaking children’s phonological development from the following four dimensions:the acquisition of vowels and consonants; the acquisition of syllabic structures; the acquisition of metrical patterns; and the acquisition of rhymes. Researches have shown that hierarchical orders for children’s language development do exist in all the four dimensions.Based on the previous researches, a theoretical framework is designed to analyze the 45 nursery rhymes from Favorite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose illustrated by Scott Gustafson, that is, to analyze these nursery rhymes from the same four dimensions.After the data is collected, a comparative study between the features of English-speaking children’s phonological development and that of the language of the nursery rhymes is brought out, which demonstrates that they share common features indeed in each and every dimension. Frequency facts mirror acquisition facts, thus proving nursery rhymes match the law of children’s development of phonology and have its irreplaceable value in children’s spoken language development.