Chapter 4: Development of

grammar

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 Stages in language development

• First stage: production of first words; words are

used by the child to denominate objects or to
interact with other people;
• Second stage (second half of the second year of
life): children combine words to form the first
‘sentences’ (simple structures, usually
containing 2 words);
• The acquisition and development of the syntactic
rules occurs unnoticed, with no explicit
instruction.

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- The main stages of syntactic development
in the pre-school period correspond to the
order in which various structures are
acquired.
- For each stage, the UNIVERSAL features
and Invariant features of children’s
language will be presented.

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 The nature of syntactic rules

- Rules that underlie the well-formed sentences: ‘WHO did

WHAT, To WHOM?’.
- Various languages use different syntactic rules to specify,
for instance, the agent or the object of a sentence.
English relies heavily on word order; Turkish allows quite
free order but employs case markers, attached to the end
of the lexical items to denote agent and object. Thus,
English and Turkish speakers employ quite different
syntactic rules to express fundamental sentence meaning.

- N. Chomsky (1957) – it is necessary to distinguish

between the surface structure (i.e. the actual linear
arrangement of words and morphemes) and the underlying
(deep) structure of a sentence (where the basic
grammatical relationships between subject and object are
specified).
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 Studying syntactic development
- Primary (raw) data (transcripts of recordings) – one
needs to look in these transcripts for patterns and
regularities, searching through what is said for what is
left unspoken, and contrasting the language at this stage
with what came earlier and what will come later.
- Spontaneous speech data - need to be complemented
with more controlled, experimental studies that are
designed to test children’s comprehension of various
syntactic forms, or their ability to produce or judge
particular constructions in less natural but more
controlled situations.

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 Entering the complex linguistic system
Q: 1. How do children manage to break up the steady stream of
sounds they hear into basic units like words/morphemes?
2. How do they learn to figure out the basic grammatical
categories of their languages such as nouns, verbs, and
adjectives?
A. – Hypothesis put forward by Morgan (1986): if adults were providing
information in their speech to children about where boundaries exist,
not only between words, but also between phrases, the task of
acquiring language would become feasible and simplified.
Once the child has broken the stream of speech into words, he may
use other ‘bootstraps’ intro the syntactic system:
a) (Pinker, 1984) meaning (semantics) plays a key bootstrapping role
for the child;
b) (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982) -the functions of language
(pragmatics) provide the primary route into the abstract
grammatical system;
c). Grammar itself provides its own bootstrapping operation = it
operates as an independent cognitive system.

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 Measuring syntactic growth
- (1973) Roger Brown – mean length of utterance
(MLU) - excellent indicator of syntactic
development: each new element of syntactic
knowledge adds length to a child’s utterance.
MLU is determined by the number of meaningful
units (morphemes, rather than words).
Morphems: content words (pisica, joc, a face,
rosu, cat, play, go red), function words (nu, tu,
asta/ no, you, this) and affixes or grammatical
inflections.

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Fig.1 MLU according to chronological age (Sarah, Adam, and Eve)

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Based on MLU, Bown divided the stage of major
syntactic development into 5 stages:
-stage I: MLU = 1.0 – 2.0;
-stage II; MLU = 2.0 – 2.5
- stage III: MLU = 2.5 – 3.0
- stage IV: MLU = 3.0 – 3.5
- stage V: MLU = 3.5 – 4.0 (Note: from one stage
to the other, MLU grows with 0.5). When MLU is
beyond 4, it cannot be used as a benchmark;
longer sentences do not simply reflect what the
child knows about language.

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 Examples of two-/three word utterances
Andrew Eve Sebastian

more care bye-bye baby pusca maie

more high Daddy bear (s)tau aicea eu

no more Daddy book pune iaia cinte

no pee there Daddy ute ata maie

no wet there potty sa pind nasu a tie

all wet more pudding bebe cinte

all gone Mommy do iaia cinte

bye-bye back eat it

mama come read it

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Features of early sentences
a) children’s speech is very creative: the structures
produced in stage I are unique and are not imitations
of adut sentences;
b) simple sentences; certain words (content/open-class
words) are dominant. Thus, sentences are
predominantly formed by nouns, verbs, and adjectives;
functors/closed-class words are missing in this stage;
this gives children’s sentences a ‘telegraphic’ aspect;
c) Certain words are more frequent in one particular’s child
corpus;
d) One can identify certain favoured conversation topics:
possession, location, repetition.

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 Semantic relations

- Universal feature of stage I: only a small

group of meanings or semantic relations is
expressed in the children’s language. L.
Bloom (1970) first observed this in the
study of American children. Brown (1973)
extended the findings to children acquiring
Finnish, Swedish, Spanish, French,
Hebrew, Korean and Japanese.

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Semantic relation English Romanian

agent + action mommy come; daddy sit taiat-o dotu, mama duce

action + object drive car; eat grape

agent + object mommy sock; baby book taie pomu’

action + location go park;sit chair

entity + location cup table; toy floor Ca(r)tea jos

possessor + possession my teddy; mommy dress

coada monkey
entity + attribute box shiny; crayon big

demonstrative + entity dat money; dis telephone A(s)ta maie

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 Word order

- regularity of children’s word order

- Braine (1976): there are large individual differences in

the order in which different semantic relations were
acquired.
- Pinker (1984, 1987): children use semantics to provide
the key bootstrap into the linguistic system. The child
can use the correspondence between things and names
to map onto the linguistic category of nouns. Names for
physical attributes or changes of state are expressed as
verbs.
- Importan syntactic in stage I: the order of words
expresses the basic relationships in a sentence.

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 Children’s early comprehension of syntax.

• When do children start to comprehend

two-word utterances?
• Is comprehension in advance of
production or vice-versa?
• Which is the relationship between
comprehension and production?

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Contradictory findings:
- some studies confirmed parents’ opinion
according to which children understand two- or
more-word utterances exactly when they start to
pronounce the first words;
- Other studies: children could say more than they
understand or that the two skills are
simultaneous;
Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek (1980): a new method
of evaluating language comprehension by
children aged 12 months - the ‘two video-
monitors” method.

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After stage I: major changes:
a) Sentences become longer: children start
combining two or more semantic relations: e.g.
agent + action and action + object can be
combined into agent + action + object;

b) Gradual emergence of inflections and of some

function words. The acquisition of most
important grammatical morphemes starts as
soon as the child has reached an MLU of 2.0

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 Brown’s 14 morphemes
-present progressive: -ing
- two prepositions: in, on;
-two articles: a, the;
-plural: -( e)s
- Irregular past tense
- Possessive: ‘s
- Copula (uncontractible)
- Regular past tense (ed)
- Third person present tense, regular
- Third person present tense, irregular
- Auxiliary, uncontractible
- Copula, contractible
- Auxiliary, contractible 18
Explaining the order of acquisition of the 14 morpheme.

Brown (1973) - remarkable similarity among the subjects

(Adam, Eve, and Sarah) concerning the acquisition of
the morphemes.
acquisition = the moment when the morpheme is used
90% in obligatory contexts. First morphemes acquired
– the 2 prepositions, plural marker, and the progressive
marker. Last morphemes acquired: contractible forms
of the copulative and auxiliary verbs.
Q: What accounts for this invariant sequence of
development?
a) Frequency hypothesis: the morphemes morfemele
auzite mai frecvent de catre copii vor fi achizitionate mai
devreme;
b) Linguistic complexity of morphemes: semantic=the
number of meaning encoded in the morpheme) &
syntactic (the number of rules required for the
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morpheme).
 Productivity of children’s mrphology
• Charming mistakes – mistakes in applying a morphological rule when it
should not be applied.

- English: the use of the plural marker –s with nouns that have irregular
plurals: e.g. mans, foots, teeths, peoples; the use of the –ed ending for
irregular verbs: falled instead of fell, goed > went , or broked > broke .
- Overgeneralization errors = excellent source of evidence for the productivity
and creativity of the child’s morphology. These are forms no child would
have heard from an adult.
- Berko-Gleason’s (1958) example with the wug for the plural:
This is a wug. Now there’s another wug. There are two of them. There are
two …….

-Both the semantic and the syntactic complexity of morphemes have an

important role in determining the order of the acquisition of grammatical
morphemes, Evidence: study carried out by Slobin on a number of
languages (Turkish, Italian, Servo-Croat, English). Aim of the study: to study
the acquisition of location morphology – prepositions in & on). Conclusion
of the study: there is a certain degree of similarity in the order of
acquisition that can be explained on the basis of the complexity hypothesis.
Still, there were also differences among the languages that could not be
accounted for in terms of the syntactic complexity.
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 Acquisition of sentence types
a) Negative sentences
U. Bellugi (1967): 3 main periods in the acquisition of the full negative.
a) A sentence is made negative by placing the negative marker no/not
(nu) outside the sentence, usually preceding it.
e.g. No go movies (‘nu merg/mergem la film’)
No sit down (‘nu sta/stau jos’)
b) The negative word is moved inside the sentence and placed next to
the main verb.
e.g. I not like it
I not want book
c) Last period (not reacehd before stage V)In ultima faza (care nu este
atinsa, de obicei, inainte de etapa V) is marked by the
appearance of different auxiliaries and the child’s negative
sentences then approximae the adult forms
e.g. You can’t have this.
I don’t have money.
I’m not sad now.

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L. Bloom (1970) – one can distinguish 3 semantic
categories of negation:
a) nonexistence – when the child remarks on the
absence of something: no cake, appu juice
allgone.
b) rejection – when the child opposes something:–
no wash hair.
c) denial - when the child denies the truth of a
statement made or implied by someone else:
That not Daddy.
L. Bloom (for English) & McNeill (for Japanese) –
there 3 semantic categories of negation appear
in children’s speech in the order indicated above.

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b) Questions
Yes/No - questions - inversion of the auxiliary with the subject (children
begin to master the syntactic rule only in stage III; they provide
monosyllabic answer.
Wh-questions – answers to these questions are more complex and
contain more information.
e.g. When dinner? ‘
e.g. ‘What that?’
(Sebastian): Un(d)e cutu?

- Order of acquisition of questions intorduced by wh-woeds:

Bloom (1979): what, where, who – questions acquired first; later
acquisitions: when, why, how (both in comprehension and in
production).
-factors that contribute to this order:
1) semantic and cognitive complexity (concepts required to encode
how, when, why questions – manner, time and causality – are more
abstract and develop later than concepts encoded in what, where,
who questions)
2) linguistic complexity – children begin by askind (and answering)
questions concerning objects, people and locations that can be
answered with a single word or short phrases.. 23
 Later developments in preschoolers (after stage V)
a) Passives.
Horgan (1978) – study focused on the acquisition of
passive voice by children aged between 2 and 13 years.
Findings:
1) younger children – full passives produced much less
frequently than truncated passives (in which no agent is
specified) : The window was broken.
2) There were topic differences between the children’s full
and truncated passives: full passives almost always had
animated subjects (girl, boy, cat), while truncated
passives almost always had inanimate subjects (lamp,
window).
Conclusion: the two types of passive sentences develop
separately; at least for the young child, these are
unrelated (truncated passive are really adjectival in form).
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Bever (1970) – compared the way in which children aged 2,
3 & 4 years understand active and passive sentences.
-semantically reversible sentences (both nouns could
plausibly act as agent or object): The boy kissed a girl
(active) – The boy was kissed by a girl (passive).
-semantically irreversible sentences (only one noun can act
as an agent): The girl patted the dog – The dog was
patted by the girl.
These sentences are understood earlier than the
reversible ones.

- Bever suggested that children aged 3-4 years have

developed a generalized abstract rule that order of
words in English signals the main sentence relations.
English (& Romanian) - noun-verb-noun in the active
voice mean agent – action – object. Consequently,
when they hear a passive sentence, they ignore the was
& by and infer the meaning f the passive NVN sequence
to be active.
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b) Coordination
- At about 2;6, children start combining sentences to express more
complex ideas – they use the conjunction ‘and’. The development of
such structures depends not only on linguistic complexity, but also in
semantic and contextual factors.
- Order in which different coordinations enter the child’s speech.

• sentential coordination - two (or more) complete sentences are

conjoined: I am pushing the wagon and I am pulling the train.
• phrasal coordination – phrases within the sentences are conjoined:
I’m pushing the wagon and the train.
Jeremy (1978): study of the contexts where children used these forms
in order to describe the events ‘interpreted’ by the inveestigator.
Finding: sentential froms were used when the events took place at
different times or in quite separate locationsWhen events occurred
simultaneously and in the same location, phrasal forms were preferred
at all ages.
Bloom et al (1980) – longitudinal study: fixed order of meanings of
‘and’: additive > temporal relations > causal relations . Other
meanings (e.g. object specification, adversative relation).

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c) Relative clauses
Bloom (1980) - relativization develops much later
than coordination and is used exclusively to
provide information about the sentence object.
e.g. Let’s eat the cake what I baked.
Give me the chair you […] sitting on.
Children find it easiest to add a clause at the end
of a sentence rather than in the middle, since
this minimizes constraints on processing.
In Romanian – different situation: children produce
relative clauses that specify the subject of a
sentence. This is due to the fact that the
pronoun introducing the relative clause does not
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change.
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