11/8/1

ASSIGNMENT ON PSYCHOLINGUISTICS:

SYNTACTIC DEVELOPMENT

IN

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

SHIVANI JOSHI
SNDT, CHURCHGATE
2013-2014

Introduction:
By all accounts, a major characteristic distinguishing human beings from their
nearest primate relatives is the use of language. A central question in this regard is
how human beings maintain the conventions of a particular language across
generations in a speech community, that is to say, how children acquire a language.
During the last decades, of special interest to many developmental psycholinguists is
the question of how children acquire the syntactic structure of a language, because
they do not hear an adult speaking in abstract syntactic categories and schemas but
only in concrete and particular words and expressions. The best known answer to this
question – first proposed by Chomsky and more recently popularized by Pinker and
others – is that children do not have to learn or construct abstract syntactic structures
at all, but rather they already possess them as a part of their innate language faculty. It
is argued that all human beings acquire a language, but there are different languages
in the world, and it seems any human being is capable of learning any of these as a
native language with equal ease (Stork and Widdowson, 1974).
 According to Dr Joseph Kess (1993), no child fails to learn a native language, and it
is learned largely before the age of 5. Although babies learn how to speak at different
rates, almost all little ones learn how to form words and sentences in a similar order,
beginning with single syllables and graduating to more complex ideas like tense. In just
a few short years, a child goes from no language at all to forming cohesive sentences
following grammatical rules. This process is called Syntactic Development. Syntax
refers to the rules used to combine words to make sentences; Syntactic Development is
the way children learn these rules. It is measured using MLU, or mean length of
utterance, which is basically the average length of a child's sentence; this increases as
a child gets older. According to Jean Berko Gleason's book, "The Development of
Language," kids go through five stages of syntactic development which were identified
by Roger Brown in 1973. Children automatically develop syntactic rules without explicit
instruction; they learn it simply by listening to others speak around them.
By the time children are in their tenth-eleventh months, they have passed the
Cooing and Babbling stages i.e. they can now produce combinations of vowels and
consonants and are capable of using their vocalizations to express emotions and
emphasis. The two main stages of syntactic development are stages in utterance
length and stages in development of transformations.

I. Stages in utterance length

1. One-word Stage (Holophrastic) i.e. single word utterances

(12-18 months)

Between the ages of twelve and eighteen months, babies usually begin to use words to
communicate, beginning with one-word utterances. Within a few months of uttering
their first words, they move into two word combinations. According to Gleason, these
primitive sentences mostly consist of nouns, verbs and adjectives with a lack of
important grammatical elements. This period is characterized by speech in single terms
which are uttered for everyday objects such as “milk”, “cookie”, “cat”, “cup” etc. Also,
the child starts using words to indicate names: “mama” or “doggie”; certain actions or
demands: “more!”, “no!”
We sometimes use the term “Holophrastic” (meaning a single form functioning as a
phrase or a sentence) to describe an utterance that could be analyzed as a word, a
phrase or a sentence. While many of these holophrastic utterances seem to be used to
name objects, they may also be produced in circumstances that suggest the child is
already extending their use. But child utterances don’t necessarily mean what adult
utterances mean. Child uses language for social purposes, trying to convey ideas and
feelings.
However, Cattell (2002) states that it isn’t until real two-word utterances begin we can
say that syntactic (grammatical) constructions have started to form. He adds that until
you have two words to rub together, then, there isn’t any syntax because syntax is
about the relationship between words in a sentence. Some linguists have challenged
this notion by claiming that single-word utterances are really ‘holophrastic’ sentences;
in other words the single word stands for a sentence.
At about ten months, infants start to utter recognizable words. Some word-like
vocalizations that do not correlate well with words in the local language may
consistently be used by particular infants to express particular emotional states: one
infant is reported to have used to express pleasure, and another is said to have

used to express "distress or discomfort". For the most part, recognizable

words are used in a context that seems to involve naming: "duck" while the child hits a
toy duck off the edge of the bath; "sweep" while the child sweeps with a broom; "car"
while the child looks out of the living room window at cars moving on the street below;
"papa" when the child hears the doorbell.
Young children often use words in ways that are too narrow or too broad: "bottle" used
only for plastic bottles; "teddy" used only for a particular bear; "dog" used for lambs,
cats, and cows as well as dogs; "kick" used for pushing and for wing-flapping as well as
for kicking. These underextensions and overextensions develop and change over time
in an individual child's usage.

2. Two-word stage i.e. "mini-sentences" with simple semantic

relations (18-20 months)

The two-word stage can begin around eighteen to twenty four months, depending on
when they begin the one word stage. By the time the child is two years old, a variety of
combinations, similar to “baby chair”, “mommy eat” and “cat bad” will usually have
appeared. The child not only produces speech, but receives feedback confirming that
the utterance worked as a contribution to the interaction.
Beginning with this Early Multi-Word Stage (EMWS), the child begins to string words
together and to form simple ‘reduced’ sentences. The average vocabulary at the
beginning of this stage is of about 50 words and sometimes the child may begin by
simply reproducing rote-learned structures whose meaning they may not know.
The vast majority of corpora reveal that the child is able to use a variety of semantic
relations during this stage:
 agent + action = baby sleep
 action + agent = kick ball
 action + locative = sit chair (locative means something that locates an action or
entity)
 entity + locative = teddy bed
 possessor + possession = Mommy book
 entity + attribute = block red
 demonstrative + entity = this shoe
(O’Grady 1997)

New words are assigned to the different word classes. Grammatical formatives or
functional categories seem to be either absent or rarely used. For example, in English,
children omit determiners, auxiliaries and complementizers:
baby [is] talking
Mummy [has] thrown it
[the] bunny [has] broken
want [to] go out
In English, yes-no questions are often signaled only by intonation at EMWS:
a. Fraser water?
b. No eat?
 Wh- questions at EMWS are illustrated below:
a. Where Kitty?
b. What this?
c. Who that?

Note that at this stage, the grammar is not the same as the adult grammar. However,
even though the word order isn't the same as the adult grammar, it is relatively
consistent. And they control their intonation patterns more. The grammar may be
simple at this point, but it still looks like grammar and not like chaos.

 Pivot Grammar
In psychology, pivot grammar refers to the structure behind two word phrases often
used by children. Pivot grammar is a part of Stage two language developments which
occurs around the age of 18 months and continues to when the child reaches two years
of age. After this the child enters Stage three language developments as he/she learns
more words and a more accepted structure of sentences rather than two word
utterances.

Martin Braine’s (1963) analysis of language in infants suggests that the two-word
utterances spoken by a child are not entirely based upon the random juxtaposition of
words. Children have simple rules they use to generate two-word utterances. Braine
suggests that infants frequently distinguish between two separate word classes – the
pivot (P) and the open (X) class of words. Each pair of words selects one from a small
set of words—called “pivots”—that occur in many utterances. The pivot class consists
of words that occur frequently and in fixed positions (at the end or the beginning of the
enunciation). While these pivot words tend to vary between different children, they are
often pronouns, such as “it”, “that” or “my”, prepositions such as “off” or “up”, and
certain verbs and adjectives, such as “do”, “pretty” and “see”. By contrast, Braine
identified the “X-class” of words, later described as “open class”, which occur in
different positions and also occur with much greater frequency in one-word utterances.
He hypothesized that early two-word combinations were comprised of either a type one
pivot (which occurs at the beginning of an utterance) followed by an open class word,
or an open class word followed by a type two pivot (which occurs at the end of an
utterance).
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. “more” is a common first-
position pivot. Some examples are: more cereal, more fish, more walk.
Braine posits that this rule could be one of the fundamental internal rules of grammar.

Limitations
Pivot words do occur in isolation, pivots occur in combination with one another,
sentences longer than two-words are fairly common in I, and there is distributional
evidence which indicates that more than two word-classes exist (Brown, 1973, p. 110).
The rules simply do not fit the evidence. Brown and his colleagues noted that adults
“expand” children’s utterances. If one assumes that adult expansions are generally
accurate interpretations of the child’s utterance, then pivot-open grammars are
inadequate because they underestimate the child’s knowledge.
For example, Lois Bloom showed that when one attended to context the utterance
“mommy sock” used by her child in two different ways. The first could be glossed as
 “It’s mommy’s sock,” while the second could be glossed “Mommy is putting on your
sock.” A pivot-open grammar would not be able to distinguish these two.
3. Telegraphic Stage (24-30 months)

This stage occurs between twenty four to thirty months and is named as it is because it
is similar to what is seen in a telegram; containing just enough information for the
sentence to make sense. This stage contains many three and four word sentences.
Sometime during this stage the child begins to see the links between words and objects
and therefore overgeneralization comes in. Some examples of sentences in the
telegraphic stage are “Mummy eat carrot”, “What her name?” and “He is playing ball.”
Phrases may be more than two words in this stage; however, they should still sound
very incomplete and choppy. This choppiness is actually how the phase was labeled
telegraphic. It is based off of the telegraph machine that sent messages in short
phrases because people paid per word.
At this stage, some of the children's utterances are grammatically correct like:

 'Amy likes tea' - (Subject + Verb + Object)

 'Teddy looks tired' - (Subject + Verb + Adjective)
 'Mummy sleeps upstairs' - (Subject + Verb + Adverbial)

Whilst others have grammatical elements missing

 'This shoe all wet' - (the verb carrying meaning is missing: is)
 ‘Cat no play’ – (the verb ‘doesn’t’ is missing)

Children are more likely to retain CONTENT words (nouns, verbs and adjectives that
refer to real things) and FUNCTION words (that have grammatical function: pronouns,
prepositions and auxiliary verbs) are often omitted.
Overgeneralizations are also found at telegraphic stage. This is when children make
virtuous errors in their allocation of inflections.
Also a child’s vocabulary expands from 50 words to up to 13,000 words. At the end of
this stage the child starts to incorporate plurals, joining words and attempts to get a
grip on tenses. Once the child enters the telegraphic stage, further development is very
rapid.

II. Stages in development of transformations

4. Stage Four (36-42 months)

Bowen states that stage 4 includes the acquisition of irregular past tense words, such
as "fell", followed by adding "s" to possessives, then proper use of "to be" verbs, such
as "are" vs. "is." This stage usually occurs between 36 and 42 months.

5. Stage Five (40-46 months)

Stage 5 which comes between 40 and 46 months, includes understanding of articles,
the regular past tense (adding -ed) and third person regular present tense, such as "He
 laughs". Toddlers usually apply general rules to all words before learning irregularities.
For example, a toddler will often say "goed" or "foots" before he says, "went" or "feet."
But this shows understanding of the rules; it's another automatically learned
phenomenon.

6. Stage Six (42-52 months i.e. around age 4)

From 42 months on, children reach Stage V, which includes using contractions, such as
"I'm" and "you're." They use third person irregular present tense, such as "she has,"
and more complicated uses of "to be" verbs, such as combining them with other verbs
and forming contractions with them. According to Bowen, kids have usually mastered
all of these stages by 52 months and should be able to form four to five word sentences
around age 4.

The final stage of language development brings a child's utterances closer

to adult language standards. Sub-patterns in this stage include the
acquisition of negatives, questions and other sentence elements such as
linking verbs, regular and irregular past tenses and compound and
complex sentence forms. Acquisition of adult language patterns is
generally complete between the ages of 8 and 10.

 Expressing Negation
The acquisition of negatives also shows evidence of grammar building in children.
First, children just seem to slap no down in front of a sentence to negate it, as in "no I
drink juice". Anybody who has ever been around children, in fact, knows that the word
NO appears with alarming frequency in their speech. Anyway, they start refining things
by inserting negative words in their sentences, as in "baby no sleep" or "baby can't
drink". But, at this point, they don't seem to be conscious of the fact that "don't" is
actually morphologically complex, consisting of a contraction of "do" + "not". The same
goes for things like "can't" and "won't". We know this because the auxiliary verbs "can"
and "will" and "do" aren't acquired until later on! Over time, children refine their use of
negation, gradually closing in on the adult grammar. One of the last things to be
perfected in the use of words like "anybody" and "anything" in sentences like "I don't
want anything" which are often realized as "I don't want something" in children's
speech.
• Stage 1: add no to the beginning or end of the sentence
No want some food
No the sun is shining
Wear mitten no
• Stage 2: insert a negative element
He no bite you.
I no want envelope.
That no fish school.
• Stage 3: insert a negative element, include an auxilliary
I don’t want no food.
 I didn’t did it.
No, it isn’t.
I can’t see you.

 Interrogatives/ Question Formation

Acquiring interrogatives is also a systematic business that seems to proceed
through some regular stages. At first, children seem to ask questions by making use of
rising intonation, e.g. more milk?, Mommy go?, etc... At about three years old, children
begin to use auxiliaries in yes-no questions, and they put them in the right order, e.g.
"can I have more?" But, at this point, they still don't show adult order in Wh-questions.
They generally use regular declarative order after the Wh-word, as in "Mommy, why
you are mad?" instead of "Mommy, why are you mad?" This is interesting, because at
this point they have undergone a rapid growth in vocabulary and are in control of the
word order inversion necessary for yes-no questions. So, what does this point to? Once
again, we see that kids are going through stages of grammar development. They are
not simply imitating what they hear. If this were so, they would not go through a stage
where they use the Wh-word at the beginning of the question but fail to invert the
subject and the auxiliary verb--something that we know they CAN do since they DO this
in yes-no questions.

• Stage 1: external question marker

Sit chair? (rising intonation)
I ride train?
Who that?
Where milk go?

• Stage 2: subject-aux inversion in Y/N, but not wh-Q

Does the kitty stand up?
Did Mommy pinch her finger?

• Stage 3: subject-aux inversion in wh-Q, too

What did you doed?

 Linguists also agree that certain Grammatical Morphemes are acquired in a

certain order, which may differ cross-linguistically. A child whose target language is
English, for example, will go through the following stages:
– ing
– plural –s
– copula
– auxiliary
– participle
– irregular past tense forms
– regular past tense forms
– 3rd person singular –s
– possessive

 Overgeneralizations
Overgeneralization is the phenomenon when one overextends one rule to cover
 instances to which that rule does not apply. This phenomenon may appear in different
aspects such as semantic, syntactic, morphological, or behavioral. It is a systematic
way that children create and unconsciously use, and here appears the greater
opposition to the idea of imitation. It is creative.
Overgeneralizations are cases in which a child gives a word a broad range of meaning
that it has in the adult grammar. For example, the child incorrectly generalizes the word
"doggie" to include squirrels and perhaps other furry animals that make up part of his
or her world. What is important to note here is that overgeneralization is not simply
random. Children over generalize along reasonable semantic grounds. Children at first
may over generalize grammatical rules suggesting that they have intuited or deduced
complex grammatical rules (here, how to conjugate regular verbs) and failed only to
learn exceptions that cannot be predicted from a knowledge of the grammar alone.
Also, the plural suffix is acquired pretty early. But, as is the case in the acquisition of
the past, children go through a period when they regularize irregular plural forms, in
essence, over generalizing the use of the regular plural.

 The inflection -s to mark plurality is seen to be added to irregular verbs: sheep –

sheeps;
foot
– foots
 The inflection -ed to mark past tense is seen to be added to irregular verbs: go –
goed;
find-
finded

They certainly haven't learned these forms from the adults around them. So they aren't
imitating adult speech but they are figuring out grammatical rules, in this case the way
to form past tense verbs and plural nouns. They will later modify their natural rules of
past tense and plural formation to accommodate the exceptions, including brought,
went, mice, and feet. And moreover, they'll modify their language only when they're
good and ready. Why this is important is that it again points to the fact that kids are
acquiring language through building a grammar, not through simple rote memorization.

 As a preschooler learns to read, he/she will develop in all areas. Most children,
however, start understanding syntax and semantics before phonics. For example,
he/she will learn that sentences in a book run from left to right before he/she
understands what the letter combination "sh" sounds like.
A child who grasps syntax has an awareness of written language. Syntax skills
begin with an understanding of the structure of a book and the words and sentences
within it. For example, a baby holds books upside down, sucks on them or uses them as
a mat to sit on. As a toddler then, he/she starts to understand that a book has a front
and a back, that words are read from left to right and that the book progresses page by
page. Once the child grasps the structure of a book, he/she'll begin to understand
what's inside: words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters. As the preschooler tackles
new books, he/she'll start to get to grips with the stops, starts and pauses in a sentence
 and the purpose of punctuation.

 The Grammar Module and Mental Dictionary:

According to Steven Pinker's model, presented in Words and Rules, all normal
human brains come primed for language acquisition. They have an innate ability to
memorize vocabulary, internalize rules regarding their native language's grammar
and syntax, and remember irregular forms. Children are constantly hearing and
processing speech, so their brains are able to analyze the grammatical structure of
the sentences and parse it into basic rules about the language. As a result, children
learn the basic vocabulary of their language, as well as grammatical details like add
an 'ed' to put a verb in the past tense and irregular forms like went instead of goed.
Young children do not always speak correctly. However, children's error rates are
often overestimated by adults whose trained ears pick up incorrect forms or usages
easily, but ignore or take for granted the more common regular forms; in actuality,
their mistakes are relatively rare considering the mental feat being attempted. Those
mistakes that are made are often highly illuminating - they reveal information about
how children learn their native language.
Of course, children's mental dictionaries expand rapidly as they acquire new
vocabulary and learn new idioms and expressions. Likewise, their grammar modules
quickly learn and apply the proper rules of the language. The errors adults notice arise
when one of two situations occurs: either the grammar module fails to supply the
proper rule, or the mental dictionary fails to supply the proper word. In the first case,
the result is sentences like Her went to the store or They was leaving early. In both
examples, proper English grammar is not being upheld; the grammar module has
supplied an incorrect rule or has not supplied a rule at all.
In the second case, the mental dictionary fails to provide an irregular verb or
pluralization or a complete idiom; the result is sentences such as We goed to the
store, I saw three deers, or He's such a two-goody-shoes. In these cases, it is not
regular English grammar that is violated; rather, it is irregular forms that cannot be
predicted from grammatical rules (that is, that must be stored in the mental
dictionary) that are misused. Of course, this error can go the opposite way as well,
and children can irregularize regular words that are similar in sound to irregular ones.
This leads to items such as hat as a past tense of hit (by analogy to sit-sat).

 Deficits in Semantic-Syntactic Abilities:

Wiig was one of the early researchers to study syntax and semantics (Wiig,
Lapointe, & Semel, 1977). This research consistently demonstrated deficits in various
semantic and syntactic abilities among children with learning disabilities. For example,
these children demonstrate deficits in the ability to apply morphological rules
(formation of plurals, verb tenses, and possessives are some examples). Also,
comprehension and expression of syntactic structures have been identified as a deficit
area among these children. These syntactic structures include relationships between
words in sentences and phrases. Understanding who a pronoun applies to and what
function is served by a direct object and an indirect object are examples of this
syntactic skill. These deficits are apparent both in the child's understanding of the
language of others and in his or her own production of spoken language. Finally, at
least one of these studies demonstrated that oral language production did not
automatically improve with age for students with learning disabilities as it does for
other students (Wiig et al., 1977). This may suggest a critical period in which language
intervention must take place if such intervention is to be effective.
Recent research has demonstrated that receptive language of particular types of
information may be a problem for students with learning disabilities. Abrahamsen and
Sprouse (1995) investigated the ability of students with learning disabilities to
understand fables that were read to them and to select the correct moral for the fable.
Based on the early research, which suggests that average students begin to
understand figurative language (i.e., metaphors, similes, idioms, and proverbs) in about
the fourth or fifth grade, these researchers presented fables to two groups of students,
14 average learners and 14 students with learning disabilities. The students with
learning disabilities were less capable of selecting the correct moral for the fable when
four selections were presented, and they were also less capable of explaining their
choices. Thus, ambiguity and subtle meanings seem to elude children with learning
disabilities. Perhaps a classroom example is in order. Many teachers issue multiple
directions to students in the inclusive class, particularly when it is time to change
subjects. However, the students in the class who are learning disabled may have some
difficulty in understanding the teacher's meaning. Imagine a teacher who says
something like the following: "OK, that's it for spelling today, so you can put your books
away. Get out your history homework to pass up. Get your history books and notebooks
and put them on your desk."
Note that four separate commands are included in this brief set of instructions. The
child must do something with spelling books, history homework, history books, and
history notebooks. The child with learning disabilities may very well end up with the
history homework sitting on the desk along with the history book and history notebook,
when the teacher wanted the homework passed up to the front of the row. This child
may also be inclined to misread the referent for the pronoun them in the last sentence,
thinking that that pronoun also applied to the history homework. Misreading
instructions such as this is a frequently mentioned problem whenever teachers discuss
students with learning disabilities, and this problem is related to the inefficient use of
language.

Here are some ways to develop syntax skills with a preschooler:

 Read aloud books that rhyme. There are some great story books that rhyme, such
as The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson. Or try a book of nursery rhymes.
 As you read, follow the words with your finger. This will show your preschooler
how a sentence progresses, that a full stop represents a pause in the flow of the
story and other relationships between written and spoken language.
 Write a letter with your child. Emphasize the different parts of the letter:
introduction, sentences, paragraphs, closing.

Conclusion:
The grammar of a child’s sentence seems a tough nut to crack. But what is
surprising is that the child progresses and keeps producing sentences which become
more and more complex, in their grammar, without having a great deal of difficulties. It
is claimed that by the age of 4, most children acquiring English have mastered the
central utterances of English syntax. Of course, they have not finished acquiring
English and more complex sentences take them longer to acquire (maybe up to 10).
But by the age of 4 many children can handle passive constructions as well quite
complex questions. The question is that how do they come to be able to do that at such
a young age.
In sum there is as yet no definite answer as to how language development takes
place but we are able to investigate through the application of various linguistic and
psycholinguistic theories.