THE DEVELOPMENT OF GRAMMAR

Grammar development 
is the way that children learn how to
express themselves with language. It
includes spoken and written grammar
development, as well as
punctuation development
 One word stage / Holophrastic stage
 The average child is about a year old when it speaks its
first words. Roughly between 12 and 18 months is
begins to speak in single word utterances such as ‘milk’
mummy’ and so on. This is known as the ONE WORD
STAGE. Occasionally more than one work may appear to
be involved but this is because the child has learned the
group of words as a single unit and thinks it is all one
word. For example: ‘Allgone’.
 Two word stage
 Two word sentences usually appear when the child is around 18 months old.
Usually, the two words are in a grammatically correct sequence such as:
 Subject + verb  - Jenny sleep (Jenny is sleeping)
 Verb + object Suzy juice (Suzy is drinking juices)
 Subject + complement Daddy busy (daddy is busy)
 Also, when a child tries to repeat what an adult has said, it will miss out part
of the sentence, but what is retained is usually grammatically correct:
 ADULT:         Look Charlie, Ben’s playing in the garden
 CHILD:          Play garden
 This example shows how children in this stage focus on key words. Words that
convey less information such as ‘in’ or ‘the’ for example, are missed out.
WHAT WAS SAID ACTION POSSIBLE MEANING

Mummy sock Child picks up sock This is mummy’s sock

Mother puts sock on Mummy’s putting my

Mummy sock
child sock on
  
 The Telegraphic Stage
 From the age of about 2, children begin producing three and four
word utterances. Some will be grammatically complete such as
‘Amy likes tea’ or ‘Mummy sleeps upstairs’ but others will have
essential grammatical elements missing such as ‘Daddy home
now’ or ‘Laura broke plate’. These utterances are similar to
some of those used in the two-word stage – they can often make
sense, but key elements are missing such as:
 Articles – ‘a’ ‘the’
 Auxiliary verbs – ‘is’ ‘has’
 Prepositions- ‘to’ ‘on’ ‘for’
 Conjunctions – ‘but’ ‘because’
Acquistion of Inflections
Research indicates there is a
predictable pattern in the acquisition
of inflectional affixes. These are word
endings such as –ed and –ing. Functional
words such as articles like ‘a’ and ‘the’
and also auxiliary verbs seem to be
acquired in a regular order.
 Cruttenden (1979) divided the acquisition of
inflections into the following three stages:
 1)   
In the first stage, children memorise words
on an individual basis
 2)   In the second stage they show an awareness
of the general rules of inflections. They observe
that past tense forms usually end in –ed so instead
of ‘ran’ they say ‘runned’. This kind of error is
known as Overgeneralisation.
 3)    In the third stage, correct inflections are
used
 Understanding Grammatical Rules
 Children produce accurate grammatical
constructions from an early age, and researchers
have tried to determine if they have learned this
themselves or have copied adult speech. A famous
experiment was carried out by Jean Berko (1958)
who showed children pictures of fictitious
creatures he called ‘Wugs’.  At first, the child was
shown a picture of one creature and told ‘this is a
Wug’. Then, they were shown a picture of two
Wugs, and the children were asked to complete the
sentence ‘Now there are two…’.
 Grammar Development Stages for a Child

 Children do not learn how to speak properly

overnight. Instead, the process of grammar
development is slow and continuous. While no
two children are the same, there is a general
grammar progression that parents can expect
their children to follow. As children move
through the stages of grammar development,
they become more and more adept at
speaking in proper English.
Stage 1
Children generally begin speaking in
recognizable words between 9
months and 1 year old. At this
stage, children speak in single
words. The words that children
learn within this age span are
predominantly nouns.
 Stage 2
 Between 1 and 2 years of age, children
develop the ability to speak in two-word
sentences. These sentences are often not
grammatically correct, sometimes
consisting of two nouns, and other times a
noun and a verb. Most commonly, the
sentences begin with a verb and end with a
noun. “Want milk,” for example, is a
common stage 2 sentence.
Stage 3
 Stage 3 spans from 2 years to 2 1/2 years.
During this time, children develop the
ability to speak in three-word sentences.
These sentences are often formed in a
grammatically correct order. Children also
begin to engage in basic pronoun usage
during this stage, using the pronoun “I” as a
self-referent quite frequently.
Stage 4
Children develop the ability to
speak in simple sentences between
the ages of 2 1/2 and 3 years old.
These simple sentences include
proper syntax, and usually consist
of three to four words.
Stage 5
Between the ages of 3 years and 3 1/2
years, children begin to integrate
compound and complex sentences into
their vocal line-up. At this stage in
grammar development, 90 percent of
what a child says is clearly intelligible,
reports the Children's Development
Institute.
Stage 6
Children engage in stage 6 of
grammar development between
the ages of 3 1/2 and 4 1/2 years.
During this stage, children improve
their ability to navigate irregular
verbs and properly use plural noun
formations.
 Stage 7
 Beyond the age of 4 1/2 years, children
continue to increase the complexity of their
sentence formations. Modifiers, including
adjectives and adverbs, become increasingly
prevalent during this development stage. As
children progress to school age, they learn
the structures of formal grammar and modify
their grammar as necessary to make up for
any grammatical deficiencies.
 Error Identification
 Fixing grammar problems in your writing is extremely
difficult without knowing the eight parts of speech.
Sometimes you may encounter a sentence in your writing
that doesn't sound right, but you can't explain why or
determine how to improve it. Other times a teacher may
circle a sentence in your writing that needs fixing, but you
don't understand what's wrong with it. In both cases
having a firm grasp on the parts of speech and their
functions can help you correct the sentence. Grammatical
problems such as subject-verb disagreement, pronoun-
antecedent disagreement, run-on sentences, sentence
fragments and comma splices all require knowledge of
certain parts of speech to fix.
 Two-Word Utterances and Speech Comprehension
 When does language begin? In the middle 1960s, under the
influence of Chomsky’s vision of linguistics, the first child
language researchers assumed that language begins when
words (or morphemes) are combined.
 The transition to 2-word utterances has been called
“perhaps, the single most disputed issue in the study of
language development” (Bloom, 1998). A few descriptive
points: Typically children start to combine words when
they are between 18 and 24 months of age. Around 30
months their utterances become more complex, as they
add additional words and also affixes and other
grammatical morphemes.
 Second, as utterances become more complex and
inflections are added, we find the famous “over-
regularization”—which again shows, of course, that children
are systematic, not simply copying what they here.
 Brown’s Two Main Findings Two main findings are described
in A First Language.
 1. The “Semantic Look” of Stage I Speech First, that the
organization of early word-combinations cannot be
described in purely syntactic terms. Brown and his
coworkers quickly had to change direction. Syntactic
descriptions didn’t suffice.
 That’s to say, Stage I constructions couldn’t be
satisfactorily explained either as “telegraphic” speech, or
in terms of “pivot-open” grammar.
 Pivot-Open grammars
 Martin Braine suggested that children have simple
rules they use to generate two-word utterances.
Each pair of words selects one from a small set of
words—called “pivots”—that occur in many
utterances, and always in a fixed position (either
the first word, or the second). For example,
“Allgone” is a first-position pivot: allgone egg,
allgone shoe, but not shoe allgone. A second-
position pivot “off”: shirt off, water off, etc. The
choice of the second word is more “open.”
 From Non-Semantic (Lean) Grammars to Semantic
(Rich) Grammars

Brown and his co-workers started instead to describe two-word

utterances in semantic terms. They employed a process that Lois
Bloom called “rich interpretation”: using all the contextual
information available to infer what the child meant by an
utterance. As Lois Bloom said, “evaluation of the children’s
language began with the basic assumption that it was possible to
reach the semantics of children’s sentences by considering
nonlinguistic information from context and behavior in relation
to linguistic performance. This is not to say that the inherent
‘meaning’ or the child’s actual semantic intent was obtainable
for any given utterance.
 “Major Meanings at Stage I”

Two-Word Utterance Semantic relation

expressed
mommy come; daddy sit agent + action
drive car; eat grape action + object
mommy sock; baby book agent + object
go park; sit chair action + location
cup table; toy floor entity + location
my teddy; mommy dress possessor + possession
 Childrenwhen they first combine words
talk about objects: pointing them out,
naming them, indicating their location,
what they are like, who owns them, and
who is doing things to them. They also talk
about actions performed by people, and
the objects and locations of these actions.
Brown suggested that these are the
concepts the child has just finished
differentiating in the sensorimotor stage.
Two-Word Utterance Probable meaning expressed Possible gloss
Mommy sock Possessor-possessed or “That’s Mommy’s sock”
Agent (acting on) an object “Mommy, put on my sock”
More juice! Recurrence “I want more juice”
Throw chicken Action on object “(Dad) is throwing the toy
chicken”
Individual Differences Brown also noted some individual differences among
Adam, Eve, and Sarah. Two of the children combined V with N, and also used N
for possession: eat meat, throw ball, mommy sock. But the child third combined
V (or objects of possession) with pronouns: eat it, do this one, my teddy. These
two strategies were found by other researchers too. Catherine Nelson called
them pronominal & nominal strategies (they have also been called “holistic &
analytic”; “expressive & referential”), and noted that they could be seen in one-
word utterances also: some children tend to produce single-word utterances that
are nouns, other children tend to use social or personal words such as hi, bye,
and please.
 1. How Does the Child go from Semantics to Syntax?
Brown’s research found that the grammar of children’s
early word combinations was better described in semantic
than in syntactic terms.
Steven Pinker (1984, 1987) suggests that children use
semantics to enter the syntactic system of their language. In
simple “basic sentences” the correspondence between things
and names maps onto the syntactic category of nouns.
Paul Bloom has argued that children actually are using
syntactic categories from the start, and he cites as evidence
for this the fact that children will they place adjectives
before nouns but not pronouns: big dog but not: * small she
Psycholinguistic study of
Grammar
 The psycholinguistic enterprise
 Psycholinguists who study adult processing are interested in how people
understand and produce language. In the sub-area of comprehension, their
aim is to develop theories that explain how listeners understand utterances in
real time, even in the face of massive ambiguity and indeterminacy in the
input. For production, the goal is to capture how speakers move from a
communicative intention to a series of articulatory gestures, which results in
utterances that are reasonably fluent and typically comprehensible to others
 Psycholinguistic investigations focus on the constraints
associated with real time processing. People understand
language at the rate of about 300 words per minute,
which implies that lexical retrieval, syntactic parsing, and
semantic interpretation all occur in a matter of a few
hundred milliseconds.
 In the area of language generation, research has
established that lemma access, tree building, and
phonological /phonetic processing all happen
simultaneously and at the rate of about one word per half-
second
Current issues and methods in psycholinguistics

 A major weakness in the field of psycholinguistics is that it

has focused too heavily on written language, when the
spoken medium is much more commonly used and
obviously is ontogenetically primary. The reason for this
reliance on reading has been convenience: It is easier to
present stimuli to participants on a computer monitor
than to try to record speech files and play them out, and
more importantly, until recently, no sensitive online
measures for recording moment-by-moment processing
were available for auditory language.
Thank you so much for
listening..God bless us all!!!
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