putting words together:

morphology and syntax in preschoolers

nikko dañolko
 THE STUDYING
SYNTACTIC
DEVELOPMENT

TWO-WORD UTTERANCES
NATURE OF SYNTACTIC
RULES

overview MEASURING SYNTACTIC

GROWTH
DEVELOPING
GRAMMATICAL
MORPHEMES
DIFFERENT SENTENCE
MODALITIES
LATER DEVELOPMENTS IN
PRESCHOOLERS
BEYOND PRESCHOOL
 introduction
Within a few months, usually in the
latter half of the second year,
children reach an important
milestone: They begin putting words
together to form their first
“sentences”
The child combines words in a
systematic way to create sentences
that appear to follow rules rather
than combining words in random
fashion.

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 introduction
The importance of syntax is that it
allows children to express messages,
even with a limited vocabulary. One of
the remarkable features about the
development of grammatical rules is
that it seems to take place almost
unnoticed, with no
explicit instruction.
However, children comprehend many of
the grammatical rules of their language
well
before they utter even their first words.

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 children’s early
comprehension of syntax

Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1996)

propose that very young children use a
number of cues to help them
comprehend grammatical forms. These
cues include prosody, semantics, and
syntax, as well as the environmental
and social context in which they hear
utterances. Children are thus able to
exploit knowledge gained from
listening to adult speech in context to
guide the acquisition of grammatical
forms.

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studying
syntactic
development
 studying syntactic
development

Among the first researchers to

study child language development
in a systematic way were Roger
Brown, Lois Bloom, and Martin
Braine, who all worked in the
1960s and early 1970s to describe
the growth of language in small
cohorts of children.

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 studying syntactic
development

Although the children differed in

some behaviors, Brown was able to
notice similarities in the order in
which the children mastered
aspects of English grammar, and
described a number of “stages” of
language development

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 studying syntactic
development

Spontaneous speech data are an

especially important source of
information about the kinds of
errors that children make at
different stages of grammatical
development. Errors are often the
most interesting clues about the
child’s underlying linguistic
knowledge (Stromswold, 1996).

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 studying syntactic
development

These studies of spontaneous

speech can tell us a great deal about
the language produced by the child,
but they do not reveal much about
what the child can or cannot
understand. Nor do they tell us
what the child might have been
able to say if the opportunity had
arisen.

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two-word
utterances
 two-word utterances

The first stage that Brown

identified followed children
through their earliest attempts at
multiword utterances, when most
of the child’s sentences are two
words long, although a few may be
as long as three or even four words.

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 two-word utterances

First, from the beginning, the

child’s language is truly creative;
many of these sentences would
never have been spoken in exactly
the same way by an
adult.
Second, these sentences are simple,
compared to adult sentences, and
simplicity is accomplished in a
systematic way

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 two-word utterances

Certain words called content

words, or open-class words,
dominate the children’s language.
Thus, these early “sentences” are
composed primarily of nouns,
verbs, and adjectives.

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 telegraphic speech

Brown and Fraser (1963) called

children’s two-word utterances
telegraphic speech, because the
omission of closed-class words
makes them resemble
telegrams.

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 telegraphic speech

More recent studies that have looked at

children acquiring other languages, for
example, Italian (Caselli, Casadio, &
Bates, 1999), Turkish (Aksu-Koc, 1988), or
Hebrew (Levy, 1988), which have much
richer morphological systems and may be
less reliant on content words (and their
order within an utterance) to express basic
grammatical relations, have shown that
even at the earliest stages, children
acquiring these kinds of languages are also
beginning to acquire some of the closed-
class morphology.

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 telegraphic speech

Studies on the acquisition of other

languages have also led some to
question whether nouns really are
acquired before verbs, as suggested by
Imai and Gentner (1997). While the
English pattern of an early advantage for
nouns has been observed for children
learning a variety of languages
(Klammler & Schneider, 2011;
Bornstein et al., 2004), some researchers
report that verbs do not emerge later
than nouns in other languages.

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nature of
syntactic rules
 syntactic rules

Much of our understanding of the

nature of syntactic rules has come
from linguists who have been
concerned primarily with
characterizing the rules that
underlie the well-formed sentences
of adult language users—the
natural end point of the acquisition
process.

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 syntactic rules

The most influential linguistic

framework is the one developed by
Noam Chomsky, called the theory
of universal grammar, or UG. One
prominent version is known as
government and binding theory, or
GB (Chomsky, 1981, 1982).

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 syntactic rules

According to Chomsky, the goals of

any theory of grammar, such as
universal grammar, are that it is
compatible with the grammars of all
the world’s languages (the goal of
universality) and that it must, in
principle, be compatible with the fact
that children worldwide acquire the
grammar of their language within a few
short years, usually with little or no
explicit training or correction (the goal
of learnability).

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 syntactic rules

According to Chomsky, a theory of

syntax is a theory of language
knowledge; essentially, it is a theory of
how we represent language as a set of
principles in our minds. Chomsky
believes that our mental representation
of grammar is autonomous of other
cognitive systems, which means that
the principles and rules of grammar are
not shared with other cognitive systems
but are in fact highly specialized.

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 government binding theory

The central tenet of GB theory is that

there are several components of the
grammar that are linked at different
levels of representation.
Of key interest are the two levels: d-
structure, which captures the
underlying relationships between
subject and object in a sentence (the
basic unit of
grammar); and s-structure, which
captures the surface linear
arrangements of words in a sentence.

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 government binding theory

In order to see why these two levels

are necessary, consider the
following
sentences:
John is easy to please.
John is eager to please.
Both sentences have virtually the
same s-structures:
noun–verb–adjective–infinitive
verb

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 government binding theory

However, they mean quite different

things. The subject of the verb to please is
John in the second sentence, but someone
else in the first. This difference in the
underlying grammatical relationships of
subject, predicate, and so forth, would be
captured by very different d-structures.
From a developmental point of view, we
must ask how children come to grasp the
underlying grammatical relations of
sentences they hear (d-structures) when
they are presented only with s-structures.

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 government binding theory
Figure 5.2 also shows that each level, s-structure
and d-structure, has several components. The s-
structure has two parts: phonetic form, which is the
actual sound structure of the sentence; and logical
form, which captures the meaning of sentences (this
component connects the grammar to other aspects
of cognition). The d-structure is fed by two other
components of the grammar: phrase structure rules
and the lexicon. Phrase structure rules are rules that
dictate how to construct phrases and sentences out
of words. The lexicon specifies a number of
important features (morphophonological, syntactic)
for each lexical item in a sentence. Together, the
lexicon and the phrase structure rules generate the
d-structure of a sentence.

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measuring
syntactic
growth
 measuring syntactic growth

Studies of large numbers of

children have provided excellent
normative data on the age at which
English-speaking children make the
transition to combining words and
using simple sentences. Some of
these data come from a set of
parental report measures called the
MacArthur-Bates Communicative
Development Inventories

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 MacArthur-Bates Communicative
Development Inventories

which provide highly reliable

information about children’s
language abilities at the early
stages. These inventories are now
available in 40 different languages
and dialects

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 mean length of utterance

Roger Brown (1973), in his classic

studies of Adam, Eve, and Sarah,
introduced a measure of the length
of a child’s utterances called the
mean length of utterance (MLU),
which has come to be widely used
as an index of syntactic
development in early childhood.

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 mean length of utterance

MLU is based on the average

length of a child’s sentences scored
on transcripts of spontaneous
speech.
Length is determined by the
number of meaningful units, or
morphemes, rather than words.

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2023 putting words together 32
developing
grammatical
morphemes
 brown’s 14 morphemes
Grammatical morphemes subtly shade the meaning of sentences. The
morpheme group studied by Brown included:
• two prepositions (in, on),
• two articles (a, the),
• noun inflections marking possessive (’s) and plural (-s),
verb inflections marking progressive (-ing),
• third-person present tense of regular verbs (e.g., he walks) or
irregular verbs (e.g., he has),
• past tense of regular verbs (e.g., he walked) and irregular verbs
(e.g., had),
• and the main uses of the verb to be: as auxiliary, both when it can
be contracted (e.g., I am walking or I’m walking) and when it
cannot be contracted (e.g., I was walking),
• and as a main verb or copula in its contractible form (e.g., I am
happy or I’m happy) and its uncontractible form
(e.g., This is it),
• where you cannot contract the two /s/ sounds without losing the
inflection.

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 brown’s 14 morphemes

The process of acquiring each of

these grammatical morphemes is a
gradual one—they do not suddenly
appear in their required contexts all
of the time. Rather, their
appearance
fluctuates, sometimes quite sharply,
during the period when they are
being acquired until they are almost
always present.

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 brown’s 14 morphemes: order
of acquisition

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different
sentence
modalities
 different sentence modalities

Gradually, children begin to master

the
morphosyntactic devices that mark
sentence modality, and these come
to complement the
earlier-acquired prosodic devices.
In this section we will follow the
course of development
of two different sentence
modalities: negatives and questions.

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 negatives

In the first period a sentence was

made negative by placing the
negative marker, no or not, outside
the sentence, usually preceding it.
There were many utterances of
this form:
No go movies.
No sit down.
No Mommy do it.

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 negatives

In the next period, the negative

word was moved inside the sentence
and placed next to the main verb;
however, there was no productive
use of the auxiliary system. During
this period Bellugi reports examples
such as these:
I no like it.
Don’t go.
I no want book.

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 negatives

The final period (which is not

usually reached until Stage V) was
marked by the appearance of
different auxiliaries, and the child’s
negative sentences then
approximated the adult forms.
Negatives such as these are
produced during this final period:
You can’t have this.
I don’t have money.
I’m not sad now.

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 negatives

Bellugi’s analysis of negation

focused on the development of its
syntactic form. Because of the
complexity of the English auxiliary
system, children take a long time to
acquire full mastery over the
expression of negation in English.

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 questions

Children seem to rely on rising

intonation in the earliest stages
(Klima & Bellugi, 1966). We can
also form this question, called a
yes/no question since these are the
responses that are called for, by
reversing the subject of the
sentence (Mommy) and the
auxiliary verb
(is), as in “Is Mommy going?”

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 questions

A different group of questions is

used for obtaining more than a
simple yes/no answer.
They are called wh-questions in
English since they begin with what,
where, which, who,
whose, when, why, and how.

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 questions

Children initially ask wh-questions

without an auxiliary verb
altogether:
What that?
Where Daddy go?
They then include the auxiliary but
do not consistently switch it around
with the subject:
Where are you going?
What she is playing?

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 questions

An interesting finding originally

observed by Bellugi (1971) is that
even after children consistently
invert the subject and the auxiliary
in their affirmative questions, they
may fail to do so in their negative
questions, producing non-adult
forms like “What you don’t like?” in
contexts in which adults typically
produce “What don’t you
like?”

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 questions

Wh-questions can also be formed from

complex sentences, including multi-
clause sentences. For example, wh-
movement can apply to multi-clause
sentences like “Mary told Jane that we
should get something” and “I think Mary
told Jane that we should get something,”
to form these long-distance questions:
What did Mary tell Jane that we
should get?
What do you think Mary told Jane
that we should get?

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later
development in
preschoolers
 later development in
preschoolers

By the time children begin school,

they have acquired most of the
morphological and syntactic rules
of their language. They can use
language in a variety of ways, and
their simple sentences, questions,
negatives, and imperatives are
much like those of adults.

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 later development in
preschoolers

There are more complex

grammatical constructions that
children begin using and
understanding during the preschool
years, by early Stage IV, but their
acquisition is not complete until
some years later.

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 passives
The passive construction is used relatively
rarely in English, to highlight the object of
a
sentence or the recipient of an action. For
example, one might say, “The window was
broken by a dog,” if the focus is on the
window. Because the order of the agent and
the object is reversed (relative to their order
in active sentences) in passives in English,
this particular construction can reveal a
great deal about how children acquire
word-order rules that play a major role in
English syntax.

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 coordination

The simplest and most frequent way

children combine sentences is to
conjoin two propositions with and.
Research on young children’s
development of coordination with
and has demonstrated that, like
many of the other constructions we
have considered, its development
depends not only on linguistic
complexity but also on semantic and
contextual factors.

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 coordination

all used phrasal coordination before

sentential coordination. The only
acquisition order that was not
observed in these studies is one
where sentential coordination
appears before phrasal
coordination.

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beyond
preschool years
 anaphora

Children continue to develop in this

domain of language. Certain
constructions are not yet fully
controlled by children at the time they
enter school. One area that has received
much attention in recent years, because
of its centrality to GB theory, is the
child’s knowledge of anaphora—how
different pronoun forms link up with
their referents—who or what they refer
to—in a sentence.

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 anaphora
Consider the following sentences:
John said that Robert hurt himself.
John said that Robert hurt him.
We know that in the first sentence, the reflexive pronoun ‘himself’
must refer to Robert (Robert must be the one who was hurt). By
contrast, in the second sentence, the anaphoric
pronoun ‘him’ can refer to anyone except Robert (Robert cannot
be the one who got hurt). According to GB theory, this knowledge
is encompassed in the binding principles, which are a part of our
grammar. These sentences illustrate two of the binding principles
(A and B), which are loosely defined here:
Principle A: A reflexive must be bound by a referent that is within
the same clause.
Principle B: An anaphoric pronoun cannot be bound by a referent
within the same
clause.

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 anaphora
Conroy, Takahashi, Lidz,
and Phillips (2009) summarize all of these
studies and conclude that a consideration of
the differences among the methods used
suggests that experimental factors may
explain children’s failure in Principle B
studies, and they report three new studies
showing that even 4-year-olds obey Principle
B when the problematic experimental
conditions are avoided (and they fail when the
problematic conditions are reintroduced into
the experiment). This suggests that knowledge
of Principle B may indeed be present from an
early age.

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thank you