Studies in child language indicate that social and environmental
conditions affect the rate of language development in children. Most of
these researches have been carried out in western countries with
different sociolinguistic settings. The few available ones in Nigeria
are longitudinal studies where each of the researchers used just one
subject, a child, of which it is difficult to generalise their findings
with unstudied children. This study is, therefore, a cross-sectional
assessment of language development of selected preschool children. The
motivation of the research stemmed from observed variation in the
language abilities of children and how social variables contribute to
this.The research objectives were to investigate the relevance of home
and school environment, as well as the roles of age and gender to the
pace of language development in children. The research used 12 subjects
between 2 and 5 years, from different sociolinguistic environment. The
subjects were purposively sampled from two nursery schools: Queen of
Peace Nursery School, Ahmadu Bello University and Rehoboth Academy, both
in Zaria. The choice of the two schools was based on the perceived wide
discrepancy in their condition of learning. Both questionnaire and
elicitations were used to gather data. The questionnaire provided
demographic information about the subjects. On the other hand, the
elicitations involved presenting a collection of objects to the
children. Attention was paid to their ability to label the items, their
articulation and understanding of the objects. The theory used for data
analysis was an eclectic approach, comprising Mentalism and
Behaviourism, while Bloom and Lahey (1978)served as a transcription
model. With regard to the relevance of home background, it was
discovered that whereas linguistic background and occupation of parents
can influence the pace of language development in children, it is not
the same withparental educational/economic status andthe birth position
of children. Data also showed that school environment plays a key role
in the rate at which children master language, as certain classroom
practices such as imitation, practice and reinforcement make language
development faster. This finding supports the behaviourist view that
children â€-learn' language just like any human behaviour, imitating the
adults around them. However, some verbal behaviours of the subjects such
as the prevalent use of overextension, sound simplification and correct
conceptualisation of objectswithout knowledge of their signifiers,
showed that language development is much more than imitation, as the
children could not have picked such behaviours from adults.This
emphasises the mentalist postulate that language development is a
maturation process. In addition, the study found that age is a major
contributor to linguistic competence in early childhood, while gender
has little or no significant effect on the process.