The Development of Syntax and Morphology: Learning the Structure of Language

The Development of Syntax and Morphology: Learning the Structure of Language By: Erika Hoff About the Author Some Features of Adults Knowledge of Language Structure An Overview of Grammatical Development Early Multiword Utterances After Telegraphic Speech Individual Differences in Grammatical Development Measuring Grammatical Development The development of Comprehension of Structured speechWhat is the Nature of Childrens Grammars Issues in Explaining the Acquisition of Grammar

About the AuthorErika HoffA professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University.

She has also taught courses on language development at the University of Winsconsin Parkside and, as guest instructor, at the University of Jyvskyl, Finland.

She has held visiting scholar positions at Marquette University (Milwaukee), McGill University, and the National Institute of Child and Human Development.

Dr. Hoff holds an M.S. in psychology from Rutgers The state University of New Jersey (1976) and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan (1981).

She conducts research on the process of language development in typically developing monolingual and bilingual children. She has received funding for this research from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Spencer Foundation.

Dr. Hoffs research has been published in Child Development, Developmental Psychology, First Language, The International Journal of Behavioral Development, The Journal of Applied Psycholinguistics, The Journal of Child Language, and the Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. She is Associate Editor of the Journal of Child Language and co-editor of the Blackwell Handbook of Child Language Development (2007) and of Childhood Bilingiualism: Research on Infancy through School Age (2006).

Some Features of Adults Knowledge of Language StructureProductivity of LanguageThis characteristics of knowledge and language of knowledge ----- that speakers and hearers have the capacity to produce and understand an infinite number of novel sentences.

Generativity of LanguageSyntaxis the component of grammar that governs the ordering of words in sentences.

Syntactic Rules John kissed Mary,

Sentence John + kissed + Mary

Sentence agent of action + action + recipient of action

Sentence Noun + Verb + Noun

Some more Information About Adults Syntactic Knowledge Kinds of categories rules operate over

Kinds of structures the rules build

Kinds of Categories Rules Operate OverOpen-class words, content words, or lexical categories

consists of noun, verb, and adjective

The words in these categories do most of the work of carrying the meaning of a sentence. They are called open classes because you can always invent a new noun, verb, or adjective and use it in a perfectly grammatical sentence.

(e.g., the blick gorped the fepish woog.)

The closed-class words, also called function words or functional categories

These are auxiliaries like can and will, prepositions like in and of, complementers like that and who, and determiners like the and a. They are called closed-class words because you cant really invent new one, and they are called function words or functional categories because their main role in the sentence is to serve grammatical functions rather than to carry content.

Kinds of Structures the Rules BuildThis feature about grammatical knowledge concerns the nature of sentence structure. Sentences are not merely linear arrangements of content and function words: They have hierarchical structure. John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln.

A Confederate sympathizer shot the 16th president.

The clever runner stole second base .

The catcher swore.

Sentence Noun Phrase + Verb Phrase

Verb Phrase Verb + ( Noun Phrase)

Noun Phrase (Determiner) + (Adjective) + Noun

These rules say that a sentence is made up of a Noun Phrase plus a Verb Phrase; that a Verb Phrase comprises a Verb plus an optional Noun Phrase; and that a Noun Phrase comprise a Noun optionally preceded by a Determiner, an Adjective, or both. These three rules generate a large number of sentences, they also describe the hierarchical structure of sentences. Words are combined to form phrases, and phrases are combined to form simple sentences.

Complex sentences are formed by combining simple sentences, and this is how the system acquires the capacity to infinite number of sentences with a finite vocabulary. You can endlessly conjoin sentences, and you can embed sentences in larger sentences.

Example:

The catcher swore.

The umpire noticed that the catcher swore.

The crowd saw that the umpire noticed that the catcher swore.

MorphologyMorphemes--- the smallest units of meaning. --- Bound morphemes and Free morphemes

Grammatical Morphology, also known as Inflectional Morphology

Inflectional Morphology

--- add grammatical category to words, but they do not change the meaning or the grammatical category of the word. That is, cats is just more of the same thing that cat is, and they are both nouns.

--- This is in contrast to derivational morphemes (e.g., the er in dancer and runner, the ish in pinkish and smallish), which actually form new words, potentially of a different grammatical category. That is, run refers to a manner of locomotion and is verb; runner refers to a person who locomotes in that manner and is a noun.

Examples include the s that goes on the end of a verb to indicate a third-person subject (He talks), the ed that goes on the end of a verb to indicate past tense (He talked), and the ing that goes on the end of a verb to indicate progressive action (He is Talking).

The form of a noun is different depending not only on whether the noun is singular or plural but also on whether the noun is the subject of the sentence, the direct object, or the indirect object----and that would be just part of the morphological system. Compare the following English and Hungarian sentences:

The boy gave a book to the girl.

A fi egy knyvet adott a lnynak. (The boy a book gave the girl.)

Descriptive versus Prescriptive RulesPrescriptive rules--- An English class teaches the current standard of language use for educated speakers and writers.

Descriptive rules--- Linguists, in contrast, take whatever people do as correct and try to describe the patterns in it.Me and Tiffany went to the mall.

*mall the to went me Tiffany and

The study of language acquisition is the study of how children learn the language used by the adults around them. Thus, we are concerned with the acquisition of the descriptive rules that disallow *mall the to went me Tiffany went to the mall, not the perspective rules that deem Me and Tiffany went to the mall bad grammar.

An Overview of Grammatical DevelopmentOur Task in this Chapter To fill in and supplement this sketchy outline

To begin with what has historically been the primary database for describing grammatical development: the utterances children produce

To describe the transition from single-word speech to the production of word combinations

To follow the course of development in production through to the production of complete sentences

To turn to the topics of individual differences in the course of development in production and the measurement of grammatical development.

To review studies of comprehension for further evidence of what children know about the grammar of their language at different developmental points.

To look at the theoretical in the field regarding how to describe childrens linguistic knowledge at the different points in development and how to account for the changes that occur.

Early Multiword UtterancesTransitional formsTransition from One-Word Speech

Two-Word Combination

Three-Word and More Combinations

The Telegraphic Nature of Early Combinatorial Speech The Transition from One-Word SpeechVertical Constructions

Example, One little girl who woke up with an aye infection pointed to her eye and said, Ow. Eye (personal data).

Scollon (1979) called these sequences vertical constructions, because when researchers transcribe what children say, they write each utterance on a new line. A two-word sentence, in contrast, would be a horizontal construction and would be written on the same line in transcription.

Unanalyzed Word Combinations and Word + Jargon Combinations

--- Unanalyzed wholes--- Ex. Iwant and Idontknow

--- Jargon--- Ex. mumble mumble mumble cookie?

Two-word Combinations The Beginning of a Productive System

--- Example, he could say that anything is big or little; he could say that daddy and Andrew walk and sleep.

--- To introduce this little boy to a new person, Emily. If his linguistic knowledge were productive, he should immediately be able to produce Emily sit, Emily walk, and so on.

Examples of one childs two-word utterances Possessives daddy coffeeAndrew bookdaddy bookdaddy shelldaddy carmommy book mommy shelldaddy chairMommy butter

Property-indicating patterns

big balloonlittle shellall wet mommybig hotlittle hamall wetbig shelllittle water daddy all wet

Recurrence, number, disappearancemore glasstwo planeone daddy carmore boytwo stickall gone big stickmore raisinstwo ducksall gone stick

Locatives

sand ballONhand eyeIN/TOhand hairINstone outsideTOrock outsideTOdog house ON

Actor/action

mommy sitdaddy workboy walkdaddy sitdaddy sleepman walkAndrew walkdaddy walkElliot sleep

Other combinations

have it egg eat forkback eatdirty face broke pipedaddy boyboom-boom tower window byebyebutter honey

Meanings in Two-Word Utterances--- Relational meaning --- refers to the relation between the referents of the words in a word combination.

---Example, in the utterance my teddy, the word my refers to the speaker and the word teddy refers to a stuffed animal. The relational meaning is that of possession.

42Relational meanings expressed in childrens two word utterancesMeaningExample agent + actiondaddy sit action + objectdrive car agent +objectMommy sock agent + locationsit chair entity + locationtoy floorpossessor + possessionmy teddy entity + attributecrayon bigdemonstrative + entitythis telephone

Three- Word And More Combinations

Example, the sentence I watch it could be described as a combination of agent + action (I watch) and action + object (watch it).

Two characteristics of these early multiword sentences:---1.early sentences tend to be imperatives and affirmative, declarative statements, as opposed to negations, or questions (Vasilyeva et al., 2008)

---2. Certain types of words and bound morphemes consistently tend to be missing.

Telegraphic Speech----the omission of certain words and bound morphemes makes childrens utterances sound like the sentences adults used to produce when writing telegrams in which the sender paid by the word(R. Brown & Fraser, 1963)s.

The Telegraphic Nature of Early Combinatorial SpeechThese missing forms are called grammatical morphemes because the use of these words and word endings is tied to particular grammatical entities.

Example, the and a can appear only at the beginning of a noun phrase; ing is typically attached to a verb.

Why these grammatical functors (i.e. function words) and inflections are omitted is a matter of some debate.

1. The omitted words and morphemes are not produced because they are not essential to meaning.

2. Children probably have cognitive limitations on the length of utterance they can produce, independent of their grammatical knowledge. Given such limitations , they may sensibly leave out the last important parts.

3. It is also true that the omitted words tend to be words that are not stressed in adults utterances, and children may be leaving out unstressed elements (Demuth, 1994).

4. Childrens underlying knowledge at this point does not include the grammatical categories that govern the use of the omitted forms, although other evidence suggests it does.

After Telegraphic SpeechMorphological development in children acquiring EnglishThis transition takes quite a long time. Although the first grammatical morphemes typically appear with the first three-word utterances, most grammatical morphemes are not reliably used until a more than a year later, when children are speaking in long, complex sentences.

The acquisition of grammatical morphemes is not an all-or-none phenomenon ------ either for the morphemes as a group or even at level of individual morphemes. Different morphemes first appear at different times, and a long period of time passes between the first time a morpheme is used and the time it is reliably used in contexts where it is obligatory.The order in which the 14 different morphemes are acquired is very similar across different children. Brown found that Adam, Eve, and Sarah acquired these 14 morphemes in similar orders, although their rates of development were quite different.

Fourteen grammatical morphemes and their order of acquisitions1. present progressive (+ ing)2. in3. on4. plural (+ s)5. past irregular (e.g., came, went)6. possessive (+s)7. uncontractible copula (am, is, are ,was, were) 8. article (a, the)9. past regular (+d )10. third-person regular (+s; e.g., she talks)ss

11. third-person irregular (e.g., does, has)

12. uncontractible auxiliary (am, is, are, has, have)

13. contractible copula (m, s, re)

14. contractible auxiliary (m, s, re when combined with + ing; ve, s when combined with a past participle such as has been)

Morphological development in children acquiring languages other than EnglishExample, where the child learning English needs merely to learn that subjects precede and objects follow the verb, the child learning Hungarian must learn to make 18 different distinctions among roles of nouns and to add a different suffix to the noun depending on the it serves.

In English one says John kissed the girl and John gave the book to the girl in Hungarian the form of girl would be different in each sentence ---- and different in potentially 16 more ways, depending on just what the girl did was having done to her.

Morphemes are easy to acquire when they are frequent and have a reconizable form.

Are fixed position relative to the stem they attach to and a clear function.

Are easy to segment from the stem and if the rhythm of the language makes the morphemes perceptually salient.

Language with inflectional systems that both seem impossible and really do cause difficulties for second language learners are not necessarily systems that cause difficulty to children, and although children do produce occasional errors, morphological development is, like syntactic development, relatively error free.

The development of different sentence formsExpressing negation

Asking questions

Using passive forms

Producing complex sentence

Expressing Negation Childrens negative sentence forms, in order of development1. Sentences with external negative markerNo wipe fingerNo the sun shiningNo mitten Wear mitten no2. Constructions with external negative marker but no auxiliariesI cant see youI dont like youI no want envelope 3.Constructions with auxiliariesI didnt did itDonna wont let goNo, it isnt

Asking QuestionsKinds of QuestionYes/no questions can be answered with either yes or no.

Wh- questions begin with wh- words such as who, where, what, why, or when, and also include how.

Childrens question forms, in order of developmentYes/no questions_Wh- questions 1.Constructions withMommy eggnog?Who that?external question markerI ride train?What cowboy doing?Sit chair?Where milk go?What a bandaid is?

2.Constructions withDoes the kitty stand up?Where the other Joe will drive?auxiliaries----but no subjectOh, did I caught it?What you did say?auxiliary inversion in wh--Will you help me?Why kitty can,t questions stand up?3. subject-auxiliaryWhat did you do?Inversion in wh-questions What does like?whiskey taste

Using passive formsWhen the speaker wishes to make the object of the verb prominent.

When the speaker does not wish to specify the agent of the action at all.Passives that use the verb to be (e.g., It can be putten on your foot) are more frequent than get passives (e.g., He got punished) , and these two forms of passives tend to be used to express different sorts of meanings-----both by adults and by children from the time they first begin to produce passives. Get passives tend to be used to describe something negative that happened to an animate entity----- a person or animal (e.g., The boy got punished), whereas be passives tend to be about inanimate things (e.g., They [the pieces of paper] have just been cutten off [personal data]).

Producing complex sentencesDevelopmental Changes in childrens production of simple and complex sentences

Developmental changes in the types of complex sentences children produce

Children, Complex sentences, in order of developmentObject complementsWant you to draw that for me.Make her eat.

2.Coordinate sentencesYou will be the prince and I will be the princess.He was stuck and I got him out.

3. Subordinate clause sentences in which the main clause is first and the adjunct clause follows.They go to sleepI want this doll because shes big.

4.Object relative clause sentencesThere is lot of stuff that needs come off.

Individual differences in grammatical development Holistic (top-down)

---For example, a 2-year-old who stores chunks in memory might be able to say I dont wanna go nightnight by combining just two units---- Idontwanna and gonightnight.

Analytical (bottom-up)

--- In this approach children may break into structure (Pine & Lieven, 1993, p.551) by starting with unanalyzed phrases and then identifying slots in these phrases that can be occupied by different lexical items . At this intermediary stage, a child may have a repertoire of rules that allow very limited productivity. Sentence Theres the + x Sentence Me got + x Sentence Wanna + x

Measuring grammatical developmentLength in morphemes is a good index of the grammatical complexity of an utterance, and because children tend to follow similar courses of development in adding complexity to their utterances, the average length of childrens utterances has been widely used as a measure of childrens syntactic development.

For example, a telegraphic sentence such as I watch it has a length of three words and three morphemes. A nontelegraphic version of that sentence, I am watching it, has a four words and five morphemes; --ing is a separate morpheme although not a separate word.

The relation of MLU (mean length of utterance) to age for Adam, Eve. And Sarah

Stages of grammatical development and normative age rangesStageMLUAge RangeEarly I1.01-1.4916-26 monthsLate I1.50-1.9918-31II2.00-2.4921-35III2.50-2.9924-41Early IV3.00-3.4928-45Late IV/Early V3.50-3.9931-52Late V4.00-4.4937-52Post V4.5+41-Questions:What is meant by the productivity of Language, and what is its significance for the task of explaining language acquisition?

What aspects of language structure have children acquired, and what have they not acquired, when they produce telegraphic speech?

What is the difference between holistic and an analytical approach to the acquisition of grammatical structure? What would be evidence for each in childrens speech?

Thank you!!!