Syntactic Development in Children

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 Fathul Risyadi 1552040010

Syntactic Development presents a broad critical survey of the research literature on child language
development. Giving balanced coverage to both theoretical and empirical issues, William O'Grady
constructs an up-to-date picture of how children acquire the syntax of English. Part 1 offers an overview
of the developmental data pertaining to a range of syntactic phenomena, including word order, subject
drop, embedded clauses, wh-questions, inversion, relative clauses, passives, and anaphora. Part 2
considers the various theories that have been advanced to explain the facts of development as well as the
learnability problem, reporting on work in the mainstream formalist framework but also considering the
results of alternative approaches. Covering a wide range of perspectives in the modern study of syntactic
development, this book is an invaluable reference for specialists in the field of language acquisition and
provides an excellent introduction to the acquisition of syntax for students and researchers in psychology,
linguistics, and cognitive science.

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.

General Information

Syntax refers to the rules used to combine words to make sentences; syntactic development is the
way children learn these rules. Syntactic development 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.

The first recognition of grammatical development may not seem typical for the area nevertheless
it appears through the first single words. Generally the most common word classes at this stage are the
nouns (ca. 60%) and the verbs accounting for perhaps 20% of all utterances. However, it is not unusual to
find other word classes such as adjectives and adverbs although there may also exist words that are hard
to categorize in a word class (for example bye-bye) (Crystal 1997).

The outset of the production of words is, as mentioned before, defined as the one-word stage.
However, some researchers may find this concept misleading since a baby’s one word utterance could be
understood as a sentence. To present an example one could look at a child that used ‘dada’ in three
different ways: as a question, statement and a demand. For example as the child heard someone outside
the door it said Dada? Which could be interpreted, Is that Daddy coming? (Crystal 1997).

As the child reaches the age of 18 months it tends to put these single words together into a two-
word sentence. People may consider this phase as when the ‘real’ grammar development begins. Certain
sentences are possible to analyse grammatically or semantically while others are not (Crystal 1997). On
the discourse of syntax one can analyse these utterances by splitting them into smaller units. Nevertheless,
it is important to define these concepts, used in practising this analysing, in order to avoid confusions. A
word could be described as the letter between the empty spaces in a text and these words can be divided
into classes such as noun, verb, adverb, adjective, conjunction, interjection, numeral, pronoun and
preposition. One could also put them, as Crystal suggests below, into clauses; subject, verb, adverbial,
object and predicate (Estling Vannestål 2005& 1997).

1) Daddy kick –Subject verb

2) Shut door –Verb subject

3) There teddy –Adverbial subject

4) She cold –Subject adverbial

Then generally at the age around two the ‘real’ sentence building advances with more words and
various combinations, such as Man kick ball, Where daddy going? and Put that on there. The clause
structures keep in complexity with time and at the end of year three the child’s utterances resemble more
with an adult’s (Crystal 1997). As mentioned above there are several kinds of techniques one can use
when dividing a language into smaller units, two additional categories are phrase and sentence. A phrase
could be described as a unit of grammatical correction that can consist of one or several words that form a
phrase. It could be a noun-, verb-, prepositional phrase etc. The determination of a noun phrase means
that the main word is a noun and the same concept goes for remaining phrases (Hewings & Hewings
2005). A sentence has at least one or two clauses where the first word has a capital letter and the last word
finishes off with a dot, question mark or exclamation mark (Estling Vannestål 2005).

As the child develops and grows older, the language improves and the child will have to connect
the right forms of words with each other in order to produce the intended utterance. This can be done
through a system that Yule refers to as the traditional categories which divides sentences into different
boxes for example voice, number, gender, tense and person (1996). This technique is most profitable
when discussing the agreement within a sentence, for instance with: The boy likes his dog. In the noun
phrase ‘the boy’ one may consider in terms of number and person that these categories affect the choice
of tense and structure of the sentence. Hence, there must be an agreement of concord between the boy and
likes in order for a grammatically ‘correct’ sentence. Next, in the category of tense there is a multiple
choice to be made, choosing a verb that ‘fits’ the chosen noun. One could ask whether the verb should be
in the present (like) etc. Then one also have the voice, whether to create a passive (the liking has been
done) or active (the liking is happening right now) voice. The last category is gender which can be used
as describing the possession of something. In the example sentence one has the dog which belongs to the
boy and this relationship is symbolized in the agreement word, his. This choice is done through
something called natural gender which could be described as determining the choice biologically. The
possession state is then divided into three categories; male entities (he, his), female entities (she, her) and,
also when the gender does not matter as with animals there is, genderless entities (it, its).

In other languages, for example Spanish and German, they use the grammatical gender which is
more common. Spanish has two gender forms while German has three and both languages use different
articles for each gender which differs from English where the same article is used for all genders
(the).This system is nevertheless not biologically based since girl is labeled to be a neuter (das Mädchen)
and a book is labelled to be masculine in French (le livre) (Yule 1996).

Stage I

Between the ages of 12 and 18 months, babies usually begin to use words to
communicate, beginning with one-word utterances, such as “more,” “go” or “dog.” Within a few
months of uttering their first words, they move into Stage I of syntactic development, two word
combinations. According to Gleason, these primitive sentences mostly consist of nouns, verbs
and adjectives with a lack of important grammatical elements.

Stage II

As children move through the five stages of syntactic development, their sentences grow
in length. According to speech language pathologist Caroline Bowen, kids begin to learn
grammatical elements in Stage II, usually between 28 and 36 months. Most toddlers acquire
these elements in the same order, beginning with the present progressive -ing, then the
prepositions in and on.

Stage III

Bowen writes that Stage III 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.

Stage IV

Stage IV, 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.

Stage V

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.