Abstract
The language proficiency of parents is a significant factor influencing the development of children's spoken language skills, particularly in the early years of language acquisition. This study examines the relationship between parent and child language error rates, exploring the correlation between their spoken language proficiency. The participants of the study include twenty children aged 5-9 and (their) twenty parents. Data were obtained through audio recordings of parent-child spontaneous conversations at home, and through parental questionnaires to obtain information about their level of education. Adopting Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory as the theoretical framework, the findings reveal a strong positive correlation between parent and child error rates for Subject-Verb Agreement, Tense, Word Order, and Morphological errors, indicating that children tend to acquire language patterns and errors from their parents or caregivers. The findings also show that parents and children from lower socio-economic backgrounds tend to have higher error rates.
Keywords: input, language learning, spoken English, parental-language influence, Nigerian child
