Grammatical Development 2 Lecture Five Grammatical Development 2

Grammatical development 2 … This lecture will consider the acquisition of grammatical rules in more depth. We will consider: Inflections Questions Negatives

Acquisition of inflections … Predictable patterns: revealed by research in the acquisition of inflections. Grammatical function words: also seem to be acquired in a predictable order.

Brown (1973) … Study: 20 – 36 month olds exhibited the sequence shown below: -ing plural –s possessive –s ‘the’, ‘a’ past tense –ed third person singular verb ending –s auxiliary ‘be’

Cruttenden (1979) … Memorize words individually. No regard for rules. Awareness of general principles governing inflections. OVERGENERALIZATION Correct inflections are used, including irregular forms.

Understanding of grammatical rules … Researchers: How do children produce grammatically accurate constructions so early in their development? Rules?? Imitation??

Berko (1958) … ‘Wug’ ‘This is a Wug’ ‘Now there is another one; there are two of them’ Complete the sentence: ‘There are two …’

Berko (1958) … 3-4 years old: ‘wugs’ Grammatical rule for plural ‘s’ was clearly being applied.

Overgeneralization … 2 ½ - 5 years: grammatical errors show an awareness of rules. They ‘overgeneralize/overregularize’, trying to make the language more consistent than it is: sheeps wented mouses

Be careful … Although children apply grammatical rules in this way, they are not conscious that they have acquired them and would not be able to explain them = NO METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS

? Questions … Asking questions involves complex constructions. Research: suggests they are three stages involved in acquiring this skill …

Questions … Two-word stage: questions rely on rising intonation only. Second year: question words acquired: first ‘what’ and ‘where’, then ‘why’, ‘who’ and ‘how’= ‘Where daddy gone?’ Third year: begin to use auxiliary verbs and inversion…

Questions … Therefore: ‘Joe is here’ becomes ‘Is Joe here?’ However: questions involving –wh words are not always correctly inverted: ‘Why Joe isn’t here?’

Negation … NO! It also appears that the accurate expression of negative (stereotypically characterised by the ‘terrible twos’) occurs in three stages …

Negation … Single dependence on the words ‘no’ and ‘not’ used independently or in front of expressions: ‘no want’ and ‘no go bed’. Third year: ‘don’t’ and ‘can’t’ appear. Begin to appear after the subject and before the verb of the sentence: ‘I don’t want it’ and ‘Sammy can’t play’

Negation … 3. More negative forms are acquired: ‘didn’t’ and ‘isn’t’. Negative constructions are not generally more accurate.

Vocabulary test … OVERGENERALIZATION IRREGULAR FORMS METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS