GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT

 12-18 months: one-word stage

 2 years: two-word stage
 2-3 years: telegraphic speech (content words only)
 3-4 years: inflectional morphemes and the marking of regular plurals; over-regularization
 5 years: language acquired
 Measurement of grammatical development from speech:
o Mean length of utterance (MLU)
o Determined by the number of words/ morphemes produced

Two-word utterance stage

 Stage 1 of syntactic growth:

o Draw attention to object e.g. see doggy
o Identify something e.g. that ball
o Properties of object e.g. big ball
o Actor-action e.g. mommy sit
o Possessives e.g. daddy shoe
 Creative and unique  not imitations of adult speech
 Productive  combine any two words to express meanings
 Telegraphic but grammatical
 Mostly produce open class/ content words (perceptually more salient)
 Lack closed-class/function words
 Open and closed class words are learned separately

 A few of semantic relations expressed

o Agent + action e.g. mommy come, daddy sit
o Action + object e.g. drive car, eat apple
o Agent + object e.g. baby book, mommy sock
o Action + location e.g. go park, sit chair
o Entity + location e.g. cup table, toy floor
o Possessor + possession e.g. my toy, mommy dress
o Entity + attribute e.g. box shinny, crayon big
o Demonstrative + entity e.g. that toy, this phone

 Grammar in two-word utterances

o A constant + variable
 o Daddy chair, daddy come, daddy go
o Fixed order, not reversed
o Abide by the word order rule

Three-word utterance stage

 Clear relational meaning expressed in the utterances

 E.g. I watch it ; put it table ; where it go?
 SVO grammatical structure
 Mostly content words, a few function words
 Combination of two semantic relations
o Action + object; entity + location  put it table
o Agent + action; action + object  man clean car
 Imperative statement: give me ball
 Declarative (affirmative) statements: the ball red
 Exclamatory statements: don't push me
 Major grammatical categories exist (nouns, verbs, adjectives)
 Telegraphic, missing some elements e.g. bound morphemes
 Questions appears later and less frequently
o Forming questions or negative sentences in English require auxiliary verbs (acquired
late)

Why do children produce telegraphic speech?

 Reason 1: limited vocabulary? (X)
o Functions words are often omitted
o Content words are emphasized in adult speech
o Not about vocabulary size but the importance of content words
 Reason 2: limited working memory capacity
o For adults, 5-7 items holding for 20-60 seconds
o For toddlers, 2-3 items for the memory capacity  omit less important words 
telegraphic speech