Babies’ Grammar Development
Baby Talk
The grammar development of infants is best referred to as “Baby Talk”. Baby talk, according to Steinberg (2006), is a form of Parentese but with its own characteristics. Ii is also best decribed as something that parents learn from other adults and involves standard vocabulary. Insofar Baby talk is concerned, it involves the use of vocabulary and syntax that is overly simplified and reduced. In comparison with Parentese, syntax plays a less vital role in Baby Talk. It is proven that parents at times use standard syntax in Baby Talk. The comparison between the syntactically correct sentence in Parentese and syntactically incorrect sentence in Baby Talk is shown below so as to compare and contrast the lexical items used and thus highlighting the unique traits of both Parentese and Baby Talk.
Mommy give Jimmy apple VS I will give you an apple |
Based on the two examples of sentences given above, it can be deduced that neither the modal “will” nor the indefinite article “an” has been included. Aside from that, substituting proper names such ( “Mommy” and “Tony” ) for personal pronouns (“I” and “You”) is very common in Baby Talk considering that the baby must have difficulty understanding the speaker-listener relationship. Prior to using suitable personal pronouns in their daily discourse, in other words, ones must learn and master the usage of personal pronouns. The substitution proper names for personal pronouns are not solely a trait for Baby Talk, but Parentense also shares this similar feature.
Parentese
Parentese is a sort of speech that children receive when they are young. Parentese, according to Reich (1986), is also best known as “Motherese”, “caregiver speech”, “Adult-to-Child Language”. All the above terms takes into account the fact that children gain knowledge and receive input from many immediate sources and the input received ha unique linguistic characteristics. As far as speech is concerned, it is highly grammatical and simplified. However, ungrammatical sentences are found to occur but rarely. On the other hand, speech directed to children mainly comprises of short sentences with simple structure rather than complex structure. For instance, this short sentence with simple structure as in “Julia is Karim’s spouse” is commonly uttered by parents to their children as compared to this complex sentence as in “ Julia who is sitting on the bench is Karim’s spouse”
Children’s Grammar Development
Holophrastic function: one-word utterances
Not only children use single words to refer to objects, but they also use single words to express complex thoughts that involve those objects. A three-year-old girl, for instance, who has lost her mother in a shopping complex, may cry out “mama”, meaning “I want mama”. Based on this example, it has shown to us that the use of single words by children can express a variety of semantic functions and complex ideas. Bear in mind that the strings of words produced by children at this stage are not yet sentences since the child pauses slightly and uses a falling intonation of the sort at the end of each word that is commonly used by mature speakers to indicate the completion of a sentence.
Telegraphic speech: two-and three-word utterances
Children generally begin to produce two-and-three-word utterances at the age of two. Below is a table that lists a number of common two-word utterances along with the grammatically correct sentence that might be produced by mature speakers in the same situations. The possible purpose of each utterance and several semantic relations involved are also indicated in the table below.
Table 1: Two-word child utterances and their semantic analysis
| Child utterance | Mature-speaker utterance | Purpose | Semantic relations (expresses or implied) |
| Want cookie | I want a cookie | Request | (Experiencer)-State-Object |
| More milk | I want some more milk. | Request | (Experiencer)-State-Object; Quantification |
| My cup | This is my cup | Warning | Possession |
| Mommy chair | Mommy is sitting in the chair | Answer to question | Location |
| Big boy | I am a big boy | Bragging | Attribution |
| Not tired | I am not tired | Refusal | Experiencer-State-Negation |
| Where doll? | Where is the doll? | Question | Location |
| Dady run | Daddy is running | Informing | Agent-Action |
| Joe push | I (Joe) pushed the cat | Informing | Agent-Action-(Object) |
| Give candy | Give me the candy | Request | (Agent)-Action-Receiver-Object |
(Adapted from An Introduction to Psycholinguistics)
The acquisition of morpheme
Morpheme acquisition begins once two-and three-word utterances have been acquired. As far as morpheme acquisition is concerned, the children start to add function words and inflections to their utterances. In other words, function words like the prepositions, the articles and the modals as well as the auxiliaries start to appear in children’s utterances along with inflections and tense marking.
Explanation of the order of acquisition
The order of acquisition, according to Steinberg (2006), is based on three variables which are (1) Ease of observability of referent (2) Meaningfulness of referent, and (3) Distinctiveness of the sound signal that indicates the referent.
Variable 1: Ease of observability of referent
The more easily a child can see, hear or experience the referent, the more likely are such referents to be stored in memory.
Variable 2 : Meaningfulness of referent
Referents objects, situations, and events that interest children will be learned faster than those lack such interest.
Variable 3 : Distinctiveness of the sound signal that indicates the referent
The greater the sound distinction involved, the easier it will be for a morpheme signal to be learned.
The Brown morpheme acquisition research
According to Roger Brown’s research on morpheme acquisition, the children are said to acquire the morphemes in a relatively similar order. The list of morphemes and the general order in which they were acquired are shown in the following table.
| Morpheme name and concept | Examples | Observability of referent | Meaningfulness of referent | Sound signal for referent |
| (Present) Progressive | Mary playing | High | High | High |
| Prepositions | in,on | High | High | High |
| Plural | /s/, /z/, /iz/ | High | High | Low |
| Past Irregular | came,went,sold | Low/ Medium | High | High |
| Possessive | /s/, /z/, /iz/ | High | High | Low |
| Copula ‘be’ Uncontractible | What is it? | Low | Low | High |
| Articles | a, an, the | Low | Medium | High |
| Past Regular | /t/, /d/, /id/ | Low/ Medium | Medium | Low |
| Third Person Regular | /s/, /z/, /iz/ | Low | Low | Low |
| Third Person Irregular | does, has | Low | Low | High |
| Auxiliary ‘be’ Uncontractible | Is Mary happy? | Low | Low | High |
| Copula ‘be’ Contractible | Mary’s hungry | Low | Low | Low |
| Auxiliary ‘be' | Mary’s playing | Low | Low | Low |
(Adapted from An Introduction to Psycholinguistics)
Later speech stages: rule formation for negatives and other complex structures
It is undeniable that one of the earliest sentence structure rules acquired by children is negation. There are three main periods, according to the classic research of Klima and Bellugi (1966) and others who later replicated their work, that account for the negative and other complex structures.
Period 1
No money, No play that, No fall |
A negation marker (NEG) is placed or inserted at the front of an affirmative sentence. Therefore, we see the utterances commonly of the form, Neg t U (‘No fall’). It is also said that children all over the globe seem to use the same pattern in their early acquisition of negation.
I don’t want it, We can’t talk |
Period 2
The negative marker, in this second period, tends to appear within the utterance as compared to the earliest period and the negation marker “Not” is preceded by the auxiliaries ‘do’ and ‘can’.
This can’t sick, I didn’t did it, Donna won’t let go, I am not a doctor, This not ice cream, Don’t touch the fish |
Period 3
Insofar the third period is concerned, the copula ‘be’ (am not) and the modal ‘will’ (won’t) appear with negation. On the other hand, imperative negatives are formed with do instead of the simple negative. The children have a good idea of when ‘do’ must be included in the sentences (Don’t touch the fish,etc) and when ‘do’ must not be included in the sentences ( I am not a doctor). Even if the children’s mastery of negation at this period is almost complete, there are a number of minor problems such as the reassignment of tense from Verb to AUX remain to be resolved.
Language developments with advanced age including young adults
Elders have also been reported to produce more disfluencies, such as stuttering, word repetitions, and sentence fragments in speech, but they are able to repair speech errors as well as younger adults. Kemper and her colleagues found that syntactic complexity (e.g., the number of propositions or clauses in a sentence, types of syntactic structure used) declines gradually across the lifespan. Based on his research, he presented young participants aged between 18 to 24 years and older participants with 2,3,4 words and asked them to produce sentences that included the presented words. The result shows that the older participants performed as accurately as the young participants when 2 and three words were presented but less accurately when 4 words were presented. Apart from that, it also reveals that older participants produced correct, shorter, grammatically less complex sentence in comparison with young participants. In addition to that, older participants performed as accurately as the young participants when they produced sentences that included a verb with simple argument structure but less accurately when they used a verb with a more complex argument structure.
In another research, Kemper, Herman, and Liu (2004) gave both young and older participants sentence fragments to memorize that varied in syntactic complexity. Participants then had to produce a complete sentence using the fragment. The length, complexity, and propositional content of the young participants' responses were all affected by the complexity manipulation, whereas this was not the case for the older participants’ responses. One explanation of this finding is that the difficulty for older adults lies in the comprehension of the material to be retained for elaboration. Also, young adults produce more syntactically complex sentences than older adults when the verb provided takes a complement (Kemper, Herman,& Lian, 2003). Thus, this line of research provides evidence that working memory limitations constrain language production in older adults.
