Brown and Frazer The Acquisition of Syntax PDF

The Acquisition of Syntax
Author(s): Roger Brown and Colin Fraser

Source: Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Vol. 29, No. 1, The
Acquisition of Language: Report of the Fourth Conference Sponsored by the Committee on
Intellective Processes Research of the Social Science Research Council (1964), pp. 43-79
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III
THE ACQUISITION OF SYNTAX'
BROWNand COLINFRASER2
ROGER
Harvard University
What is done in a developmentalstudy of behaviordepends upon the

investigators'conceptionof the terminalstate, the outcome of the develop-
ment. Normal adults speakingtheir native languageseem to us to possessa
set of rules of word constructionand sentenceconstructionwhich enables
them to go beyondthe speechthey have actuallyheard and practicedto the
creationof lawful novelties.If new monosyllablesare created,speakersof
English will agree that stug is "betterEnglish"than ftug. Probablythis is
because they have a shared implicit knowledge of the initial consonant
clustersthat are acceptablein English. If this new word is to be pluralized,
they will agree that stug/-z/ is betterthan stug/-s/. Probablythis is because
they have sharedknowledge of a rule of regular English inflection.If the
new word is first heardin the sentence:"Here is some stug" they will agree
that a secondsentence:"The stug is there"is more likely to be grammatical
than a secondsentence:"A stug is there."Probablythis is becausethey have
sharedknowledgeof the syntacticrules for the employmentof mass nouns.
The constructionrules of which speakershave implicit knowledge are,
in their explicitform, the grammarof a language.As these rules have been
writtendown in traditionalgrammars,they constitutea collectionof largely
unrelatedstatementsabout such matters as the parts-of-speech,paradigms
of conjugationand declension,the markingof gender,and the agreementof
adjectives and nouns. Chomsky (I957) has shown that it may be possible
to systematizetraditionalgrammarinto a mechanismfor the generationof
all the sentencesof a language that are grammaticaland none that are
ungrammatical.Grammarbecomes a theory for a range of phenomena-
the sentencesof a language-and also a programfor generatingsentences-
a programthat might be followed by an electronicdevice (Yngve, I96I).
1 The work describedin this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation
by a grant administered through the Center for Communication Sciences, Massachusetts
Instituteof Technology. From Verbalbehaviorand learning: problemsand processes,edited
by N. Cofer and B. S. Musgrave. Copyright, I963. McGraw-Hill Book Company. Used
by permission.
2 Now at the University of Exeter, Exeter,
England.
43
44 ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE
It is the developmentin childrenof this kind of sentence-generating gram-
mar that we are trying to study.
The child growing up hears, from his family, his friends, and the tele-
vision, a large sampleof the sentencesof a language,and we think that he
induces from the regularitiesin this sample an implicit grammar.First-
language learning, so conceived,reminds us of two other operationswith
language: that of the linguist in the field and that of the adult learning a
second language. The descriptivelinguist trying to work out the structure
of an unfamiliartongue begins by collectinga large set of utterances-his
"corpus."From regularitiesin the corpus and from inquiries of a native
informant,he inducesrules that predictbeyond what he has observed.One
check on the adequacyof his rules is their abilitycorrectlyto anticipatenew
utterances.Anothercheck is the ability of the rules to duplicatethe distinc-
tions made by a native informantwho has been asked to judge of each of a
collectionof utteranceswhether it is or is not a well-formedsentence. It
may be that the linguisticproceduresfor discoveringsyntaxin distributional
facts are a good model for the child's learning of his native language-
with the differencethat the linguist works deliberatelyand aims at explicit
formulationwhereas the child works unwittingly and arrives at implicit
formulations.The child's syntax is made explicit for him in "grammar"
school, but we suggest that he operateswith syntax long before he is of
schoolage.
In learninga secondor foreign language,it does not seem to be possible
to memorizea list of sentencesthat is long enough to providethe right one
when you need it. Somehow the situationis never exactly right for any of
the sayings one has rehearsed.To be effective in a second language, it is
necessaryto be able to "construct"sentences,and there are two techniques
for giving the student this ability. The traditionalmethod is explicit in-
structionin the rules of grammar.With these rules and a stock of words,
one puts togetherthe sentenceto suit the occasion.A difficultyis that delib-
erate constructionis a slow business,and the boat will have sunk before
you can properlycall for help. Some modern instructiontreats the second-
languagelearnerlike a child and has him practiceagain and again the same
set of sentences.The sentencesmay be deliveredto an entire group by film
strip, or the studentmay pace himself with one of the Richardsand Gibson
pocketbooks.Eventually the student finds himself the creator of a new
sentence-one not practicedbut somehow implied by what has been prac-
ticed. Second-languagelearning by sentence rehearsalrelies on this step
into automatic construction,though nothing much seems to be known
about how to contrivesets of examplesthat will facilitateits occurrence.
It has seemed to us, then, that first-languagelearning must have much
in commonwith second-languagelearningand also with scientifictechniques
for the discoveryof linguisticstructure.The sharedcharacteristicthat is the
ground of the analogy is the necessityin all three cases of inducing general
ROGER BROWN and COLIN FRASER 45
constructionrules from sets of sentences.Of course the analogy suppresses
those featuresof first-languagelearningthat are not to be found in the other
two processes,and it has taken considerablepressurefrom reality to bring
them to our attention.
This paper is divided into three sections.The first reviews some studies
with inventedlinguisticmaterialswhich show that childrendo indeed have
rules of word constructionand of sentence construction.The second dis-
cussestechniquesby which an investigatormight induce a child'sgenerative
grammarfrom a large collectionof the child's utterancesand the, possibly
parallel,techniquesby which the child could have induced that grammar
from a large set of parentalutterances.Most of the discussionin this section
makes use of materialsfrom a recordof four hoursof speechfrom one child
of 25/2 months. The third section discussessome substantiveresults from
the recordsof I3 childrenbetween2 and 3 yearsof age; these are the results
that forced us to recognize that there are differencesbetween childrenand
either linguisticscientistsor adult studentsof a second language.
EVIDENCE
THATCHILDREN
HAVECONSTRUCTION
RULES
In the natural situation of the child with his family the best evidence
that he possessesconstructionrules is the occurrenceof systematicerrors.
So long as a child speakscorrectly,it is possiblethat he says only what he
has heard.In generalwe cannotknow what the total input has been and so
cannot eliminatethe possibilityof an exact model for each sentencethat is
put out. However, when a small boy says "I digged in the yard"or "I saw
some sheeps"or "Johnnyhurt hisself," it is unlikely that he is imitating.
Furthermore,his mistake is not a random one. We can see how he might
have made it by overgeneralizingcertain existent regularities.Many verbs
ending in voiced consonantsform the simple past with /-d/ and many
nouns ending in voicelessconsonantsform the plural with /-s/. The set of
forms me, my, myself and you, your, yourself strongly suggests he, his,
hisself. As it happens,actual English usage breakswith these simple regu-
laritiesand prefersdug, sheep,and himself. By smoothingthe languageinto
a simpler system than it is, the child reveals his tendencyto induce rules.
Guillaumemade this point in 1927 and illustratedit with a rich collection
of French children'ssystematicerrors.
A Study of MorphologicalRules
Although Smith (1933) attempted to do a study of the development
of the rules of inflectionby simply waiting for the emission of erroneous
forms, it is more economicalto invent nonsense syllablesand try to elicit
inflections.This is what Berko did for English in her doctoral research
(1958).
46 OF LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
This is a wug.
Now there is another one.

There are two of them.
There are two
FIGURE 1-Illustrationof Berko's

methodfor elicitinginflections.
A child is shown the small animal of Figure I and told: "This is a wug.
Now thereare two of them. There are two ." The experimenterholds
her voice up to signal the child that he is to completethe sentence;he will
usuallysupply wug/-z/. For a differentanimal the word is bik and the cor-
rect plural bikls/. For a third animal it is niss and the plural niss/-az/.
Printed English uses the letter "s" for all of these endings, but, as the
phonemicnotation shows and as attentionto your own pronunciationwill
reveal,the endings are distinct.The rule in English is: A word ending in a
voicelessconsonant forms its plural with the voiceless sibilant /-s/ as in
cats, cakes,and lips; a word ending in either a vowel or a voiced consonant
forms its plural with the voiced sibilant /-z/ as in dogs, crows, and ribs; a
word ending in the singular with either /s/ or /z/ forms its plural with
/-z/ plus an interpolatedneutralvowel as in classesand poses.We all follow
these rules and know at once that a new word like bazooka will have, as
its plural, bazooka/-z/, even though most speakersof English will never
know the rule in explicit form.
Berko invented a set of materialsthat providesa completeinventoryof
the English inflectionalsystem:the pluraland possessiveendings on nouns;
ROGERBROWNand COLINFRASER 47
the simple past, the 3rd person present indicative,and the progressiveon
verbs; the comparativeand superlativeon adjectives.She presentedthese
materialsas a picture-bookgame to children of preschool,first-, second-,
and third-gradeage levels and worked out the developmentof the rules
with age.
The productivityof the regular inflectionsfor children seems to be
greaterthan it is for adults. Both kinds of subjectswere shown a picture
of a man swinging somethingabout his head and told: "This is a man who
knows how to gling. He glings every day. Today he glings. Yesterday
he ." Adults hang suspendedbetweengling, glang, glung, and even
glought but childrenpromptlysay glinged. Berkoalso testedto see whether
children who generalize the regular inflection would correctly imitate
irregularforms or would assimilatethem to the rules. She showed a picture
and said, for instance,"Here is a goose and here are two geese. There are
two ." Most of her subjectssaid gooses and performedsimilarlywith
other irregularforms. These observationssuggest that rules of great gen-
eralitymay surviveand overridea numberof counterinstances.
Knowledgeof the paradigmsof inflectioncould take a child beyond his
corpusto the correctconstructionof new forms. It will not be necessaryto
hear each new noun in its plural and possessiveforms; these can be antici-
pated from the regularparadigmand, except for an occasionalsheep and
alumni, the anticipationwill be correct.The rules of inflectionare rules of
morphology,i.e., rules of word constructionratherthan rules of syntax or
sentenceconstruction.In English, though not in Russian and many other
languages,inflectionis a rathertrivial grammaticalsystem and knowledge
of inflectioncannot take a child very far beyondhis corpus.There is much
greaterpower in syntax.
A Study of SyntacticRules
The fundamentalnotion in linguistic syntax is that the words of any
naturallanguagecan be grouped into classeswhich are defined by the fact
that the members of a class have similar "privileges of occurrence"in
sentences.Certain very large and rough syntacticclasses are traditionally
called the parts-of-speech.In English, count nouns like house, barn, table,
and fence are wordsthat can be plugged into such sentencecontextsas: "See
the "; "I own a "; "The is new"; "This is
mine." If a child has learned to organize words into such classes,to enter
them on mental lists of syntacticequivalents,he will have a very powerful
means of getting beyondhis corpus.
Hearing car as a new word in the sentence:"See the car" a child could
use this context as a basis for listing car with count nouns and so be pre-
pared to hear and say such additionalsentencesas: "I own a car"; "The
car is new"; "This car is mine." And a multitudeof others. Of course the
particularsentenceuttered on a given occasionwould depend on semantic
and motivationalfactors,but the populationof sentencesfrom which the
particularcould be drawn would be establishedby the syntactic kinship
linking car with house, barn,table,and fence.
What evidencedo we have that a child acquires,with increasingexperi-
ence of his native language, implicit rules of syntax? Brown and Berko
(I960) inventeda game for childrenthat utilizes nonsensesyllablesbut not,
as in the inflectiongame, for the purposeof eliciting endings. For one prob-
lem the child was asked: "Do you know what a wug is?" He was then
shown a pictureof a little girl and told: "This is a little girl thinking abouta
wug. Can you make up what that might mean?"The picturewas included
only to engage the child's attention-it did not portraythe referentof the
new word but only someone thinking about it. The new word, wug, had
been introducedin two sentences.In both cases it was precededby the in-
definite article;it functionedonce as a noun complementand once as the
objectof a preposition.The positionsof wug in these two contextsserve to
identify it as a singular count noun. An adult speakerof English would
have expected such additional sentencesas: "Wugs are good" and "That
wug is new" to be grammatical.Brown and Berko were interestedin seeing
whether young children would answer the question: "Can you make up
what that might mean?"with a flow of sentencesemployingwug as a count
noun.
In the complete study 12 nonsense syllableswere used and they were
placed in sentencesidentifying them as belonging to one of six parts-of-
speech.Where wug was to be identifiedas a transitiveverb, the investigator
said: "This is a little girl who wants to wug something."As an intransitive
verbthe same sentencewas used with the omissionof something.With wug
as a mass noun the little girl would be "thinkingabout some wug." Wug
becamean adjectiveby having the girl think of "somethingwuggy" and an
adverbby having her think of "doingsomethingwuggily."
Childrenin the first, second, and third grades all went on to make up
sentencesusing their new words,but they did not alwaysuse them correctly.
They did betteras they got olderand betterat all ages with the count noun,
adjective,transitiveand intransitiveverbs than with the mass nouns and
adverbs.For the purposesof the presentargument3the importantresult is
that children showed an ability, increasingwith age, to constructgram-
maticallycorrectsentencesusing new words.
3 The same children were given a word-association test employing familiar English
words belonging to the same six parts-of-speechinvolved in the nonsense syllable task.
The principal finding was that the frequency of paradigmatic word associations (i.e., a
response word that belongs to the same part-of-speechas the stimulus word: house-barn;
run-walk; milk-water) was related, across the various parts-of-speech and age groups,
to the tendency to make correct syntactic use of the nonsense syllables. This result was
taken to mean that paradigmaticword associationsreflect the developing organization of
vocabularyinto syntactic classes.
The eliciting of speech with standardinvented materialsbrings some
very desirablecontrolto the study of grammaracquisition.It left us, how-
ever,with the suspicionthat we had only been chippingat the problem.The
things we thought of doing were largely suggested by fragmentaryfacts
about adult grammarand guessesas to what childrenwould have to learn.
If we were to collecta large numberof utterancesfrom an individualchild,
would it be possibleto subjectthis collectionto the kind of distributional
analysis that a linguist applies to an unfamiliarlanguage and thereby to
discoverthe child's total generativegrammar?Could one write grammar
programsfor childrenat differentages and describelanguage development
as a sequenceof progressivelycomplicatingprograms?
INDUCINGA GRAMMARFROMA CORPUS
Before collecting any data, we studied English grammar in its more

traditionalforms (Jespersen, I938; Smart, I957) and also in the recent
works of Francis (I958), Hockett (1958), Chomsky (I957), and Lees
(I960). The traditionalworks supply most of the substantiveknowledge
about word classes-knowledge which has been reinterpretedand sys-
tematized in recent works. The substanceis often more effectivelytaught
by the earliergrammarssince this is knowledgethat contemporarytheorists
often take for granted.The generativegrammarusing constituentanalysis
and transformationrules has been worked out for a part of English, but
thereis not yet a completegrammarof this kind for any language.
Rules of grammarare culturalnorms;like other norms they are descrip-
tive of certainregularitiesof behaviorwithin a community,and they also
are prescriptivein recommendingthis behavior to new members of the
community.In general,the studentof culturecan discovernorms either by
observingbehaviorand inducing regularitiesor by asking participantsin
the culture (informants) to tell him what kinds of behavior are "right"
(proper, correct) and what kinds are "wrong" (improper,incorrect). For
example, if we were interestedin the rules of etiquette of the American
middle class we might ask informantswhat a seated gentlemanshould do
when a lady entersa room and what a hatted gentlemanshould do when a
lady entersan elevator.In addition,we might observethe behaviorof seated
and hatted gentlemenin the two situations.When the cultural rules to be
discoveredare linguistic,the possibleapproachesare the same: directinquiry
of informantsas to what it is proper to say and what it is not proper to
say; direct study of what is, in fact, said. Studentsof grammarhave varied
in the degreeto which they have reliedon one procedureratherthan another.
The partial generativegrammarsfor adult speech that have thus far
been writtenhave been writtento meet the test of the grammarwriter'sown
delicate sense of what is and what is not a well-formedsentence in his
nativelanguage.This is a specialcase of the techniqueof directinquiryof a
native informantconcerningright and wrong behavior;in the presentcase
the investigatoris his own informant.Of coursethe linguist working out a
generativegrammarbelieveshis personaljudgmentsof the "grammaticality"
of utterancesrepresenta communityconsensus.The evidenceso far reported
for judgmentsmade by informantswho are not linguists (Hill, 1961; Maclay
and Sleator,I960) suggeststhat there is some consensuson grammaticality
in English but that the consensusis not perfect.
While we have adoptedthe generativemodel for grammar,we have not
been able to use the method of the linguists who have written generative
grammars.Clearlywe ought not to rely on our own senseof grammaticality
in writing the grammarsof very young children.In addition,however,we
have not found a way to make directinquiriesof native informantsbetween
24 and 36 months of age as to what they regard as well-formedsentences.
For older children,judgmentsof grammaticalitymay possiblybe elicited in
terms of what it is "right"and "wrong"to say. For the younger children,
we have so far workedentirelyfrom obtainedbehavior:a sampleor corpus
of what has actuallybeen said.
It is by no means certainthat the direct study of obtainedspeech is an
alternativeand equivalentapproachto the eliciting of judgmentsof gram-
maticality.Chomsky(1957) certainlydoes not suggestthat the notion of the
"well-formed"or "possible"sentence can be operationallytranslatedinto
the "obtained"sentence. Common observationshows that adult speakers
of Englishoften produceverbalsequencesthatare not well-formedsentences.
In the case of such anotherset of normsas the rules of etiquette,behavioral
practice might depart rather radicallyfrom ideal recommendations.The
truth is that the relationbetween grammaticalnorms and verbal behavior
is quite unexploredboth theoreticallyand empirically.Without waiting for
clarificationof this relationfor adult speakers,we have proceededto explore
the possibilityof writing rules for the actual verbal behaviorof children.
Chomsky (i957) has argued that there are no really adequatemechanical
proceduresfor discoveringan adequategrammar,and our experiencecauses
us to agree with him. Still there are some helpful tips, and Harris (I95I) is
the best sourceof these. In addition to reading about grammars,we prac-
ticed working them out from a speechcorpuslong beforewe collecteddata
of our own. As practicematerialswe used the recordscollectedby Barker
and Wright (I954) for their Midwest studies. If anyone has a taste for
word games, the grammardiscoverygame is an engrossingone, and, not
surprisingly,it yields more understandingthan can be obtained from the
readingof theoreticalworks.
We decidedto begin work in the age range from 24 to 36 months.The
youngerage is the approximatetime at which most childrenbegin producing
two-wordutterances(McCarthy,1954). Some preliminarywork showed us
that by 3 yearsmany childrenhad aboutas complexa grammaras we were

able to describe.We located 13 children in this age range whose parents
were willing to have us spenda large part of one day at their homes record-
ing the child's speech.For the first seven cases our proceduresvaried from
one to another,but for the last six they have been reasonablyuniform.
The families were of the professional,college-educatedclass, and it is
likely that the linguisticbehaviorof these childrenwas "advanced"in terms
of age norms for the American population.Only two of the 13 children
were acquaintedwith one anotherand so, with the exceptionof these two,
the speechof any one child in the samplecould not have been directlyaffect-
ing the speechof any other.Many of the familieshad first arrivedin Boston
just seven months earlier,and the speechof these parentshad been learned
in severaldifferentpartsof the country.
We hoped to get as much speechas possiblein as little time as possible
and to have examplesof the full varietyof sentencetypes the child could
produce.There were those who warned that the child would be shy and
speechlessin our presence;this was not the case. Motherstold their children
that visitors were coming and, in general, we were eagerly welcomed,
shown a paradeof toys and games, and talked to rathersteadily.It became
clearthat the child expecteda guest to put in some time as a playmate,and
so the recordingwas a two-man job with one of us taking data and the
other preparedto play cowboy,horsie,blocks,coloring,trains,and the mule
in "Kickthe mule."Severalof the early recordswere made by Fraseralone,
but for the last six cases both of us were always there. We found that by
about noon we needed a rest and so went away for lunch, returningabout
two; the child took his nap in the interval.About half of each recordwas
made beforelunch and abouthalf after lunch.
Much of the time the child was occupiedwith his normalroutineof play,
talking with his mother, washing, and eating. So long as these activities
involved a reasonableamount of speech, we took no active part beyond
deliveringsignalsof attentionand approval.When the operantlevel was very
low, we sometimestried to raiseit. In the firstdays we did the sortof verbal
promptingthat is anyone'sfirst notion of a technique for eliciting speech
from children. You ask what something is called and this brings out
vocabularyitems-which are not useful for a study of grammar.Or you
ask a "yes-no"questionsuch as: "Is that your horsie?"to which the answer
is either "yes"or "no."We eventuallylearnedthat it is easier to "inspire"
speech by doing something interestingthan to elicit it with questions. If
the adult "playmate"startsa game that is simple, repetitious,and destruc-
tive, the child will usually join him and start talking. A universalfavorite
is to build (painstakingly)an unsteadytower of blocksand registerchagrin
when the child sends it crashingdown. A simple game involving implicit
rules-such as the green blocks belong to me and the red ones to you-
createsa situationin which negative sentencescan be elicited. If the adult
playmatebreaksthe establishedrule and moves one of the child's blocks,he
is usuallytold that he is not to do that.
How were the child's utterancesrecorded?After trying severaldifferent
things, we found that it was not restrictiveto ask the motherto limit activi-
ties to one floorof the house and a small numberof adjoiningrooms.Then
with two Wollensaktape recordersand long extensioncords we were able,
in the last six cases, to get almost everythingon tape. The machineswere
handledby the "playmate,"and the other memberof the team made a con-
tinuous transcriptof the child's utterances.This on-the-spottranscriptwas
later checkedagainstthe tape and correctedinto a final best version.Going
over the tape takes about four hours to each hour of recordingtime.
What is the level of detail in the transcription?It is neither phonetic
nor phonemicbut only morphemic.It is, in short, as if we were to write
down in conventionalEnglish spelling what an adult seemed to be saying
in an interview.Of coursethe intelligibilityof speechin the youngest chil-
dren was not very good. We found it helpful to do no writing for the first
half hour and to have the motherinterpretfor us everythingher child said
in that period. In this time we learned to allow for the child's phonetic
peculiaritiesand sometimesfound an initial near-completeunintelligibility
giving way to about75 percent intelligibilty.At grammaticallycrucialpoints
our generalrule was to creditthe child with the regularadult contrastif he
made any sort of appropriatephonetic distinction.For instance,the emer-
gence of the modal auxiliarywill in a sentencelike I will get my book is
not at first markedwith a well articulated/wil/ but probablyonly with a
shift of the vowel formantsin the I toward a back vowel like /u/. If we
could hear a differencebetween this I and the way I sounded in I got my
book, the child was creditedwith will. For the last six cases we were ulti-
mately able to transcribefully an averageof 78 per cent of the total utter-
ances on the tapes; this is a degree of successquite similarto that reported
in previousstudies (McCarthy,I954). Where we were uncertainabout the
accuracyof transcription,the material was placed in brackets.Utterances
were also markedwith the following symbols:I for a functionalimperative;
? for an interrogative;M for an utterancethat mimics an immediatelypre-
ceding utterancefrom anotherperson;R for an utterancethat is a response
to a question.
One difficultywe had anticipateddid not materialize-only one. We
had thought that division of the flow of speechinto utterancesmight be an
uncertainbusiness.In fact, however,the usual criteriaof either a prolonged
pause or a shift of speakersworked very well. There were few instancesof
uncertainutterancedivision.
For the last six caseswe aimed at and obtaineda minimumof 500 differ-
ent utterancesfrom each child. Since the utterance rate of the younger
children is lower than that of the older children, we spent more time with
the younger ones.
Methodsfor Discoveringa ProvisionalGrammar

The process of grammar discovery has two facets. It is, most immediately,
the technique of the investigator who is trying to describe the grammatical
apparatus of a particular child. The investigator induces from obtained
utterances a probable generative mechanism. Since, however, the child is
also presumed to have built this internal mechanism by processing obtained
utterances, it follows that the investigator's procedure may be a good model
of the child's learning. Of course the child has not induced his grammar
from his own sentences but rather from the somewhat more varied and
complex sentences heard from adult speakers. A comparison of the recorded
speech of mother-to-child with the speech of child-to-mother shows that the
grammars induced by children from adult speech are not identical with
the adult grammars that produced the sentences. The investigator of a child's
speech, on the other hand, hopes to find the very grammar that produced
the original utterances. Even so the similarity in the tasks of investigator
and child is very great-to get from sentences to a grammar-and so while
acting as investigators we shall want to consider whether the child may have
carried out operations similar to our own.
For the kind of grammar we are trying to write the fundamental prob-
lem is to discover the syntactic classes.4 Members of a common class are
supposed to have similar privileges of occurrence, and these privileges are
supposed to be different from one class to another. In addition to syntactic
classes our grammars will involve rules of combination describing the ways
in which members of the various classes may be put in sequence. Generally
the rules of combination will get simpler as the syntactic classes get larger
and fewer. If a and an in English were words having identical privileges of
occurrence, our grammar would be simpler than it is. As it stands, however,
the two forms must be separated, and a rule of combination written that
requires an before count nouns with an initial vowel and a before count
nouns with an initial consonant.
As a basic technique for the discovery of syntactic classes we might
undertake to record for each different word in the corpus all of the utterance
contexts in which that word occurs; in short we might make a concordance.
The contexts of each word could then be compared with the contexts of each
4 The generative grammar, as

Chomsky (1957) has described it, is more than a set
of sequence rules for syntactic classes; it also provides several levels of appropriatecon-
stituent analysis. We have so far not accomplished this result for the speech of children
because we have not been able to invent appropriatebehavioral tests of the child's sense
of constituent structure. The requirement that a grammar make appropriate structural
analyses does of course help greatly in the evaluation of adult grammars, and it is
desirableto meet this requirement wherever it is possible to do so.
TABLE I
Total Contexts of Four Words in the Record of Adam
Total Contexts of "Mum"

Here it is, Mum. (The) pan, Mum. Apple, Mum.
Here, Mum. I want apple, Mum. Again, Mum?
Here (the) coffee pot I want blanket, Mum. Out, Mum?
broken, Mum. I want blanket now, Salad, Mum?
More sugar, Mum. Mum. See, Mum?*
There it is, Mum. I want juice, Mum. Coffee, Mum?
What's that, Mum. Mum, I want some, Turn, Mum?
Mum, (where is the Mum. No, you see, Mum?
cards)? Popeye, Mum? No help, Mum.
Mum, (where's the I wanta do, Mum. Won't help, Mum.
rags) ? I wanta help, Mum. Coffee, Mum.
Want coffee, Mum.* I found, Mum. Hi, Mum.*
Want apple, Mum. I do, Mum. O.K., Mum.
Want blanket, Mum. I don't, Mum. Here, Mum.
Want more juice, Mum. I get it, Mum. Over here, Mum.
I want blanket, Mum. (Gonna) dump, Mum. Enough, Mum.
I want (it), Mum. Fall down, Mum. Silver spoons, Mum.
I want paper away, Fall, Mum.
Mum. An apple, Mum.
Total Contextsof "Dad"

See paper, Dad. See, Dad?* Work, Dad?
Want coffee, Dad.* Dad, want coffee? Hi, Dad.*
I want cream, Dad. Some more, Dad?
Total Contexts of "Here"

Here (a car). Here more bricks. Here (we go).
Here all gone. Here more blocks. See the bolt here, see?
Here (block). Here more firetruck. That block here.
Here brick. Here more toys. That one here.
Here chairs. Here more truck.t That one right here.
Here coffee is. Here Mum.t I put bucket here.
Here comes Daddy. Here Mummy. Come here.
Here flowers. Here my bricks. Do here.
Here goes.t Here not a house. Leave that block here.
Here is.t Here stars. Put it here.
Here it goes.t Here (the) coffee pot Here not a house.
Here it is.t broken, Mum. Right here.t
Here it is, Mum.t Here the card. Over here.
Here's it here. Here the cards. Over here, Mum.
Here light. Here the cheese. Now here.
Here (mail) more paper. Here (the) flowers.
Here more. Here the paper.
Total Contexts of "There"

There goes.t There more block. I wanta put (it) right
There (he) goes. There more truck. there . . . (under) the
There is.t There more nails. couch.
There it goes.t There Mum.t Me see (in there).
There it is.t There my house. Blanket in there.
There it is, Mum.t There my nails. In there.
There kitty. There Noah. Right there.t
* Identifies contexts common to "Mum"and "Dad."
t Identifiescontexts common to "Here" and "There."
other word and tentativesyntacticclassesset up so as to put togetherwords

having many contextsin commonand so as to separatewords having few or
no contextsin common.
To illustratethe method of shared contexts, we have taken from the
recordof Adam5 (2812 months) the word: here, there Mum, and Dad. In
adult English here and there are locative adverbialswhile Mum and Dad
are animatenouns. Will the patternof sharedcontextstaken from Adam's
recordsuggestthe assignmentof here and there to one class and Mum and
Dad to a differentclass? In Table i all of the utterancescontainingthese
four words are listed and the sharedcontextsindicated.The upper limit to
the numberof contextsthat two words can sharein a given recordis set by
the number of contexts obtained for the less frequent of the two. Here
occursin 48 differentcontextsand there in 19. It would be possiblefor the
two words to share 19 differentcontexts;in fact they shareeight or 42 per
cent of the possiblecontexts.Mum occursin 49 differentcontextsand Dad
in eight; they share 38 per cent of the possible contexts. Here shares no
contextswith Mum and none with Dad, and the same is true for there.The
pattern of shared contexts suggests the class break that operatesin adult
English.
If one has read about the notion of syntactic equivalence but never
actuallylined up the contextsfor sets of words, it is startlingto find such
small numbersof identicalcontexts;especiallystartlingsince here-thereand
Mum-Dad must be as near to perfect syntacticequivalenceas any pairs of
words in the language and, in addition, the short sentences and small
vocabularyof a child maximizethe probabilityof repetition.Is a 38 per cent
overlapenough for us to assumethat the membersof a pair are interchange-
able? It may be.
We have taken the word here.alone and set down all its differentcon-
texts in the first half of Adam's recordand also all of its differentcontexts
in the second half of the record (Table 2). A context that has alreadyap-
pearedin the first half is listed again on its first appearancein the second
half. Here in the first half is the same word as here in the secondhalf, and
so we know that these two heres are syntacticequivalents.In the first half
the word occursin 33 differentcontexts;in the secondhalf in 19. There are
four sharedcontextsor 2I per cent of the possible-a lower value than the
value obtainedfor here-thereand Mum-Dad.
Perhapsit would be possibleto set an exact percentage-of-shared-contexts
criterionfor the assignmentof two words to the same class, the criterionto
be empiricallydeterminedfrom percentagesof sharedcontextsof identical
words at various levels of absolute and relative frequency in two time
periods. Clearly,the obtained percentageswill be very unstable for small
numbersof occurrences.For less frequent words only a mammoth speech
samplewould serveand the whole thing becomesa job for a machine.The
5 The names used in this report for
identifying child subjects are not the actual names
of the children who were studied.
56 ACQUISITION O1 LANGUAGE
TABLE 2
Contextsof "Here"in the First and Second Halves of the Record of Adam
First Half
Here all gone. Here more.* Here the cheese.
Here (block). Here more bricks. Here the paper.
Here brick. Here more firetruck. That block here.
Here chairs. Here more toys. That one here.
Here coffee is. Here more truck. That one right here.
Here comes Daddy. Here Mum. Come here.
Here is.* Here my bricks. Leave that block here.
Here it goes.* Here not a house. (Put it) here.
Here it is, Mum. Here (the) coffee pot Here not a house.
Here light. broken, Mum. Over here.*
Here (mail) more paper. Here the card.
Right here. Here the cards.
Second Half
Here (a car) Here's it here. In here?
Here flowers. Here more.* (Over here)?
Here goes. Here more blocks. Over here, Mum.
Here is.* Here Mummy. Over here.*
Here it goes.* Here stars. Now here.
Here it is. Here (the) flowers.
Here (we go). See the bolt here, see.
* Identifies contexts common to first and second halves of record.
basic problem of setting a criterion for that machine to use or of writing the
program for working out a criterion may also be a problem in the child's
learning of syntax.
Once the classes have been established by some shared-contexts criterion,
some contexts will turn out to be more "criterial" or distinctive for a given
class than will others. After the in English one can have count nouns in the
singular, count nouns in the plural, and mass nouns (which are used in the
singular only). After a one can have only count nouns in the singular, and
so this context is, for singular count nouns, the more criterial of the two. The
introduction of new words to a child in highly criterial "tracer" contexts
(like "Hi " for personal names) should be the best guarantee of sub-
sequent correct usage.
A corpus of 500 utterances is not large enough to take us very far with a
mechanical shared-contexts procedure. However, a generally adequate me-
chanical procedure for the discovery of grammars has not been worked out
in any case. Grammar writing is for the present like theory writing in
science, an undertaking for which there are some guides, clues, and models
but not a set of guaranteed procedures. Let us therefore take one record, the
utterances of Eve (25/2 months) and, allowing ourselves a very free use of
inductive reasoning, see what we can make of it.
It is a useful first step to restrictourselvesto the simplestutterancesin
the record,those of just two words, and, among these, the utterancesin
which the initial word occursat least twice. In Table 3 the recurrentinitial
TABLE 3
Two-Word Utteranceswith RecurrentInitial Words from Eve
Second I N I T I A L W O R D S
Word A Daddy Mummy 's See That The There Two
bear ...... + +
bird ...... +
block ..... +
boat ......
Bobby .... +
book ..... + + + +
bowl .....
boy ...... + +t
broken .... +
candle .... +
car .......
carriage ...
chair ..... 4-
cricket ... +
cookie .... +
cow ...... +
Daddy .... + +
dimple .... +
dirty ..... +
do ....... q-
dog ...... + +t
doggie .... +
doll ......
dollie ..... +-
Dru ......
eye ....... +
fall ....... +-
fuzzy ..... +
Gale ...... 4-
girl ....... +-
go ....... + +-
goes ......
going ..... +
honey ..... + +-
horsie ..... + +
is ........
kitty ..... + + +-
man ...... +- +-
meatball 4-
men ...... +4
mike ..... +
Mummy + + +-
nurse ..... +
pea ....... 4-3
( Table continued on next page )
TABLE 3 (continued)
Two-Word Utteranceswith RecurrentInitial Words from Eve
SeconI N I T I A L W O R D S
Second
Word A Daddy Mummy 's See That The There Two
peas ...... +
Peter ..... +
picture .... +
pillow ....
potty ... +
pretty..... +
puff ...... + +
puppy .... +
radio ..... +- -
Rayma.... +
reel ...... + + + +
rocker .... + +
rug ....... +
sun .......
that ..... +
+
'tis .......
whistle .... +
wire ...... +
NOTE.-"-+" indicates that utterancesof this type occurred.
words are listed at the heads of columns, and each row represents a second
word that occurs in at least one utterance after one of the recurrent first
words. The second word is given a + in a column if it occurs after the word
that heads the column, and so a filled square represents an obtained two-
word utterance defined by the column and row headings.
Table 3 is simply a technique for making a first inquiry into shared
contexts, an inquiry limited to the most frequently repeated and so most
informative contexts. By comparing the filled slots for any two rows, one
can determine the number of shared contexts for two second words. By
comparing the filled slots for any two columns one can determine the num-
ber of shared contexts for two initial words.
Table 3 is itself a descriptive grammar for an obtained set of two-word
sentences. The table is a description that is only very slightly more econom-
ical than actual listing of the sentences; the single slight economy is accom-
plished by writing the recurrent first words just once instead of repeating
them on each appearance. The descriptive grammar of Table 3 can easily
be turned into a generative grammar. Table 4 presents the generative ver-
sion. It reads: "In order to form an utterance: select first one of the initial
words; select, secondly, one from the class of words that are permitted to
follow the initial you have chosen." A machine that can go through this
program would produce all-and-only the obtained set of utterances.
TABLE4
Obtained
A GrammarDescribingAll andOnlythe 89 Utterances
A + Ci
Daddy + C2
Mummy + C3
's + C4
Utterance -> See + C5, a
That + C6
The + C7
There + C8
Two + C9
C1 -> block, book, candle, cricket, dog, fall, kitty, meatball, nurse, pillow, reel
C2 b- bear, book, honey
Ca - bear, dimple, do, go, puff
C4 -> bird, Daddy, picture
C5 -> boy, eye, Mummy, radio, rocker, that
C6 bird, boat, book, bowl, boy, broken, car, cookie, cow, Daddy, dirty, doggie, fuzzy,
going, horsie, kitty, Mummy, Peter, pretty, puff, Rayma, rocker, sun, wire
C7 --> bird, book, girl, horsie, kitty, mike, peas, puppy, reel, rug, whistle
C8 -- bird, boat, book, boy, carriage,chair, Daddy, doll, dollie, Dru, go, goes, is, kitty,
man, Mummy, pea, potty, radio, reel, 'tis
C9 -- Bobby, chair, Gale, men, reel
NorE.-{ } means a choice of one of the contained sequences.
Table 3 constitutesa list of differentutterances:each is listed just once.

In the originalrecordthe utterancesvaried in their frequencyof repetition.
One could write a generativegrammarthat would do a betterjob of mim-
icking the original record by setting probabilitiesat the various choice-
points: the route"That-broken,"for instance,ought to be taken more often
than the route "That-Rayma." A printedrecordturnedout by this machine
would be indistinguishablefrom actual obtained records,indistinguishable
as a list of sentencesbut perfectlydistinguishablein the life situationfor the
reasonthat the machinedescribedtakes no accountof semantics.It is quite
capableof greetingthe appearanceof Daddy with "That doggie" or "That
cookie." We have a grammarmachine, not a machine that is a complete
model for human sentenceproduction.
Now we want to go beyondthe obtainedsentencesto the syntacticclasses
they suggest. Is there any ground for consideringall of the initial words
to be membersof a single class? Considerfirst the possibilityof a shared-
contexts criterion,of the type discussed,with referenceto here-thereand
Mum-Dad.
The previousdiscussionwas greatlysimplifiedby restrictingthe problem
to single pairs of words. However, the number of candidatesfor member-
ship in a common syntacticclass is generally greater than two, and that
is the case with the initial words of Table 3. Each single word that is a
candidatefor inclusioncan be comparedfor shared-contextswith each other
word in the presumptiveclass. The criteria for class identificationmust
then prescribeminimal levels of overlapfor the full set. This is a compli-
cated problemfor which many differentsolutionscan be imagined.
In the presentcase the words that and there are the most frequent in
the set. They share seven secondword (bird, boat, book, Daddy, kitty, and
Mummy) which is 33 per cent of the number of contexts that could be
shared.Of the other words in the set 's, see, the, a, Mummy, and Daddy all
share at least one context with both that and there, while two shareswith
there but not that. One might use the syntacticallyclose pair that and there
as touchstonesand count as members any words that share at least one
context with either critical word. That rule would put all of the initial
words into the same syntacticclass (class I).
What evidenceis there that the entries in the rows of Table 3 constitute
a second syntacticclass? The words bird, book, kitty, and reel are most
frequent.Since the contextsare the words of class i, and so are few, these
frequent words have a high degree of mutual overlap.Using the four as
touchstones,most of the words enteredin rows could be entered in class 2
on the criterionof having at least one context in common with one of the
touchstones.A few, such as dimple and do, would be left out. Most of the
words in class 2 are count nouns, and if we had a largercorpus,we should
probablyfind that dimple belongs here for Eve while do does not. Our
criterionis probablynot good enough to separateout just the few words
that do not fit.
The membersof a syntacticclass are creditedwith identical privileges
of occurrence.In Table 3, the initial words are far from having identical
patternsof actual occurrence,and the second words are also far from this
pattern. If the actual occurrenceswere identical in either set, then the
assignmentto a common class might be confidentlymade, but the assign-
ment would not take us beyondwhat we have obtained.If we do go beyond
what has been obtainedin our descriptionof privilegesof occurrence,then,
of course,we will not have "proved"our description.This is the familiar
problemof the impossibilityof proving a generalizationthat goes beyond
what has been examined-the very sort of generalizationthat is most valu-
able and which the human mind is most bent on making. We are, in the
setting up of syntacticclasses,trying to move from a partial similarityof
actual occurrenceto an identity of potentialoccurrence.This is the process
of induction-uncertain but powerful.
To hold that the membersof each of our presentclasseshave identical
privilegesof occurrenceis to hold that all the empty positionsin Table 3
may properlybe filled-they are utteranceswe should expect to hear from

Eve. The generativegrammarchanges to the form of Table 5. This gram-
mar will turn out more sentencesthan Table 4, and it ought to be very
much easier to remember since the sequential contingenciesare greatly
simplified.
TABLE 5
A Grammarthat Results from Filling In the Blanks in Table 3
Utterance -> C1 + C2
C1 -- A, Daddy, Mummy, 's, See, That, The, There, Two

C2 -) bear, bird, block, boat, Bobby, book, bowl, boy, broken, candle, car, carriage,
chair, cricket, cookie, cow, Daddy, dimple, dirty, do, dog, doggie, doll, dollie,
Dru, eye, fall, fuzzy, Gale, girl, go, goes, going, honey, horsie, is, kitty, man,
meatball, men, mike, Mummy, nurse, pea, peas, Peter, picture, pillow, potty,
pretty, puff, puppy, radio, Rayma, reel, rocker, rug, sun, that, 'tis, whistle, wire
NOTE.-This grammarpredicts the 89 utterancesobtained plus 469 others.
The utterances of Table 4 and Table 5, since they are two-word utter-
ances, can very well be thought of as a set of paired associates. It is usually
the case in paired-associate learning that initial words and second words
occur always and only in their pair relation. In the present case some initial
words and some second words occur in a variety of combinations. If these
utterances were to be made up as experimental materials, what task could
we set the subject? If he were simply asked to respond to each initial word
with some one of the acceptable second words, then he could meet the
requirements by learning single associates. Suppose, however, he is required
to do what the grammardoes-respond to each initial word with all accept-
able second words. There could be two sets of materials: one made up on
the model of Table 4 with only the obtained secondaries occurring and one
on the model of Table 5 with any member of class 2 likely to occur after
any initial word. I think we can foresee that for the first set of materials
it would take a long time to learn the exact set of words that can go after
each initial word. With the second set it should not take very long to learn
the principle that any second word can follow any initial word, but it would
take some time to memorize all of the second words. But after how many
pairs, of what kinds, will subjects move to the generalization of Table 5?
We think it would be interesting to try paired-associate learning of this kind.
Refinements on the provisional grammar. Turning to utterances of three
or more words, we find evidence to indicate that not all of the members of
class i have identical privileges. Consider first the words the and a.
Table 7a presents a set of utterances in which the or a occurs after members
of class I and before members of class 2. However, the and a do not occur
after all members of class i; they do not occur after the, a, Mummy, or
Daddy. There are no utterances like "The the doggie" or "The a horsie."
These facts suggest that the and a should be withdrawn from class I and
set up as a new class 3. The grammar would then be rewritten as in
Table 6a.
TABLE 6
GrammarsSuggested by Three-WordUtterances
a. Eve's Grammarwith the Articles SeparatedOut

Utterance --> (C) +- (C8) + C2
C1 -) Daddy, Mummy, 's, See, That, There, Two

C2 - bear, bird, block, boat, etc.
C3 -) a, the
b. Eve's GrammarAllowing for Possessives

Utterance -- (C1) + (C3) + C2
C1-- 's, See, That, There, Two
C3 -a> , the, plus human terms
NOTE.-( ) means that selection of the enclosed is optional.
The optional markings in Table 6a indicate that a class can be com-

pletely bypassed. It is necessary to make class 3 optional so as to get sentences
like "That bird" and "There boat." Making class I optional makes it pos-
sible to obtain "The boat," "A book," and the like. If neither optional class
is bypassed we get such utterances as "That the cup" and "See the reel."
If both optional classes are bypassed, we get such one-word utterances as
"Dolly," "Book," "Reel," and utterances of this kind were very numerous
in Eve's record. We cannot get from this grammar such utterances as "The
the horsie," "The that bird," "A see that" and other radically un-English
sequences.
The grammar of Table 6a does turn out some kinds of utterance for
which Eve's record provides no models. It is possible, for instance, to obtain
"Two the bear" or "Two a bird." Eve produced nothing like these, and for
adults they are definitely ungrammatical. It is quite likely that two should
go with the and a in class 3 so as to yield: "That two bear" and "See the
bird." However, Eve's record gives us no utterances like these, and indeed
no three-word utterances including two, and so we may as well leave two
in class i. We have identified a point at which more evidence is needed
in order to choose between formulations.
There is another sort of utterancethat the grammarof Table 6a will
produce for which Eve's record provides no model: "Mummy the bird"
or "Daddya book."These sentencesdo not use Mummy and Daddy in the
vocative; the vocative would involve a distinctive juncture (pause) and
intonation which is suggested in print by a comma (e.g., "Mummy, the
TABLE 7
Three-Word Utterances that Refine the Original Grammar
a. Utteranceswith the or a in Middle Position

's a man See the horsie That the bowl
's a house See the radio That the cup
's a Daddy See the reel That a horsie
There the kitty See a boat
b. Utteranceswith Human Terms in Middle Position
See Evie car That Daddy car That Evie dish
See babyeyebrow That Daddy honey That Evie pillow
That Mummy book That man car That Evie spoon
That Mummy paper That baby bed There Evie car
That Mummy hair That Evie book There man coat
That Mummy spoon
bird'). An adult might form the vocative version as a kind of ellipsis of

"Mummy,see the bird,"but he would not form the nonvocativeutterance
that the grammarof Table 6a produces.
Thus far, Mummy and Daddy are in the same limbo as two; there is
reasonfor withdrawingthem from class I, but we do not yet know where
to put them. Eve's recordprovidesno three-wordutteranceswith two, but
it does provide such utteranceswith Mummy and Daddy and these are
listed as Table 7b. We find Mummyand Daddy in middle positionbetween
that (a class I word) and the class 2 words: book, hair, paper,spoon, car,
and honey. Furthermore,we find in this same position the words: Evie,
man, and baby. All of these middle-positionwords are names of human
beings, and so we may hypothesizethat such terms constitutea syntactic
class.
The difficultynow is that the middle position between class i and
class 2 alreadybelongs to class 3 which is composedof the and a. This
means that there are three clear options: (a) to include the human terms
with the and a in class 3; (b) to set up the human terms as a separate
class 4 and put this class in the selectionsequenceahead of class 3; (c) to
put the independentclass4 in sequenceafterclass3. Here now are examples
of utterancesthat are predictedby the three versionsof the grammar: (a)
"That Mummy book"; (b) "That Mummy the book"; (c) "That the
Mummy book." Our interim decision is fairly clear. Since the record pro-
vides instances of (a) but not of either (b) or (c), we will put the human
terms in class 3 with the and a as indicated in Table 6b. However, if a larger
corpus were drawn, we would have to be on the alert to correct this decision.
It may be worthwhile to consider the very complicated rules required
for adult English at an analogous grammatical point. Utterances like
"Mummy book" and "Man car" and "Evie dish" are, we know from the
situational contexts, Eve's version of the possessive; she omits the inflection.
In forming possessives with human terms, the adult speaker will use an
article before such generic human terms as man ("the man's car"), and so
these terms cannot be classified as alternatives to the and a. With personal
names like Evie the adult will form possessives but, with personal names,
articles are never used, and so we will say "Evie's dish" but neither "The
Evie's dish" nor "Evie's the dish." This means that personal names cannot
be classified as alternatives to either the articles or the generic human terms.
A final exasperating fillip is provided by the fact that some morphemes,
like Mummy and Daddy, can serve either as personal names ("Mother's
purse") or as generic terms ("the mother's role") and so would have to
be listed in two syntactic classes.
Even the simple grammar we have now produced for Eve involves
double syntactic listing for some forms-the human terms. They must be
in class 3 because of such utterances as "That Mummy book," but they must
also remain in class 2 because of such utterances as "That Mummy." The
combinational formula predicts "That Mummy Mummy" (Grandmummy?)
which is reasonably probable but also "That Evie Evie" which would not
TABLE 8
Utteranceswith RecurrentSecond Members
Initial Word S E C O N D W O R D
Baby ................... tired

Bird* .................. all gone
Carriage* ............... broken
Chair* ................. broken fall down
Doggy* ................. tired
Dollie* ................. broken fall down
Eyebrow ................ all gone
Kitty* .................. all gone fall down
Microphone ............. all gone
Mummy* ............... tired
Reel* ................... all gone
Rocker* ................. broken
Something .............. broken
* A word already identified as a member of C2.
be producedby an adult. As to whether Eve would say it, we cannot tell

from the presentmaterials.
Expansionof Eve's grammar. Recurrenceof a context is always what
is needed for the identificationof a syntacticclass. We startedwith recur-
rence of initial members,but recurrenceat the end of an utterancecan be
equally useful. In Eve's record there is a set of terminal recurrences(all
gone, broken,fall down, tired) which appearsin Table 8. The first thing
to note is that most of the initial membersof these utteranceshave already
been identifiedas membersof class 2. Their appearancehere with overlap-
ping privilegesof occurrencebefore all gone, broken,fall down, and tired
is a valuableconfirmationof the preliminaryanalysis.
Since the initial terms are alreadyregardedas one class, we are inclined
to assume that they have identical privileges of occurrencewhich means
that emptycells could be filled. This makesa new class4 of all gone, broken,
fall down, and tired, and we now have a second type of sentence.The full
grammar (Table 9a) involves two major routes correspondingto the two
kinds of sentences.
There is a slight addition to be made to the grammarof Table ga. The
addition is suggestedby three sentences:"The chair broken"; "The baby
tired"; and "The book fall down." The initial word the has alreadybeen
placedin class 3, and so it is a good guess that any word from class 3 can
appearin first position in this new sentence type, and Table 9b presents
this version.Class3 must be enteredas optionalin the grammarsince most
of the obtained sentencesomit it. It is not certain that our analysisof the
limited materialsin Table 8 is correct.The word tired, for example, does
not actually overlap in the obtained distributionwith any of the other
second members. Our analysis, relying on the prior identificationof the
first members as class 2, assumes that the overlap would occur if more
sentenceswere gathered.However, it should be noted that tired occursonly
after names of animate beings-baby, doggy, Mummy-whereas the other
second membersare not restrictedin this way. This is a fragment of evi-
dence pointing to the eventual separationof animate nouns from the gen-
eral syntacticclass of nominal expressions.This separationis a necessity
for adult grammar; certainverbs can only take animate nouns as objects.
We can say: "It surprisedJohn"or "It surprisedthe dog" but not: "It sur-
prisedthe chair."In our discussionof the possessivewe consideredthe pos-
sibilityof separatingout a class of generic human terms. The distributional
facts of adult English will show that this class has to be broadenedinto
animatenouns (we can have "the dog's house"as well as "the man's car")
and is the same class hinted at by the restrictionson tired. However, Eve's
utterancesare so few that we cannot be sure these restrictionswould be
maintained.
The reciprocalof tired in Table 8 is broken,for brokenonly occursafter
inanimatenouns-carriage, chair,dolly, rocker,something.In adult English
broken would be restrictedin this way, but we cannot be sure that it will
continue so for Eve. All gone is interesting because Eve uses this form
where an adult speakerwould not-after count nouns. We would not say
"The microphoneis all gone" or "A kitty is all gone." For us all gone goes
after pluralcount nouns ("The microphonesare all gone") or mass nouns
("The sand is all gone"). Eve does not give us any plural count nouns in
this record and does not make a syntacticdistinction between mass and
count nouns, and she uses all gone without any discoverablerestrictions.
TABLE9
GrammarsSuggested by the Terminal Recurrenceof Table 8
a. Eve's Grammarwith Two Basic Sentence-Types

{
(Cl) (C3) + C2
Utterance
C1 - 's, See, That, There, Two

C3 -- a, the, plus human terms
C4 -> all gone, broken,falldown,tired
b. Eve's Grammarwith Articles Added to the New Sentence-Type
Utterance- + (Cs) + C2
(Ce) + (C2) +0 C4
(C3)
C1 -- 's, See,That,There,Two
C2 -> bear,bird,block,boat,etc.
C3 -> a, the, plus human terms
C4 -) all gone, broken, fall down, tired
NOTE.- { } means a choice of one of the contained sequences.
The grammar of Table 9b does not represent the distributional distinc-

tions among the class 4 members for the reason that we have so very little
evidence on this point. Still, as we shall see in the next section, there are
reasons for preferring to represent the distinctions rather than to assume
identical privileges. If we were forced to freeze the grammar on the present
evidence, it would probably be better to write the more differentiated
version.
The sentences we have been discussing all begin with a class 2 word
(bird, book, etc.) with a prior class 3 (the, a, etc.) being optional. There
are many other sentences answering this description in Eve's record, but
they do not have the recurrence of second members that made the sentences
in Table 8 useful. These additional sentences are all unique and they vary
in length: "Daddy fix it"; "Eve listen to tick-tock"; "The reel go round
and round"; etc. The best thing to do with these sentences,at present,is
to make a cut after the class 2 words (Daddy, Eve, reel) and call all of the
remaindersecond members.These second membersare, from the point of
view of adult English, complex predicates.With our present inadequate
materialswe can only add them to all gone, broken,fall down, and tired as
additional membersof class 4. There is not enough material for a finer
breakdown.The fact that some of these complex predicatescontain class 2
words and some do not hints at an eventual distinctionbetween transitive
and intransitiveverbs.
TABLE 10
Utterancesof PreviouslyIdentifiedTypeswith Interrogative
IntonationAdded
Utterancesthat Have Occurredin DeclarativeForm*

's Daddy, Book?
That daddy? Doggie?
Utterancesthat Have Been Predictedin DeclarativeForm but Have Not Occurred
Daddy fix this? See babyeyebrow?
Daddy work? See babyhorsie?
's a Daddy? See cow?
's cow? That block?
's Mummy? That Evie spoon?
Daddy?
*Utterances that have occurred without rising interrogativeintonation.
There remains a collection of utterancesbelonging to types already

identifiedbut modified by the addition of a rising interrogativeintonation
(?), and these appearin Table Io. Since instancesof both kinds of utter-
ances allowed by our grammaroccur with the interrogativeintonation,it
seems reasonableto suppose that any sentence allowed by that grammar
can be so modified. The result is the revised formula of Table Ii which
at one swoop doublesthe number of sentencesthe grammarcan generate.
Table II is the completeversion of our provisionalgrammar.
There are severalthings worth noting about the grammarof Table I.
It will producemost of the 500 utterancesactuallyobtainedfrom Eve and
will produce many thousandsbeyond the obtained.The only classes that
are not optionalin the grammarare the reference-makingwords of class 2
(bear, bird, etc.) and class 3 (all gone, broken, etc.). These are, by our
observation, the forms that are used as single-word "mands" and "tacts"
(Skinner, 1957) for some time before the two-word utterance begins.
The generative grammar written out as a formula suggests a distinction
between lexical meanings and structural or syntactic meanings. The class
TABLE I
Complete ProvisionalGrammarfor Eve
C)+
Utterance > (C) + (CO)
(CO3) + (C2 + -C4
C1 -> 's, See, That, There, Two

C2 -- bear, bird, block, boat, etc.
C3 -> a, the, plus human terms
C4 -) all gone, broken, fall down, tired, fix it, listen to tick-tock, etc.
listings are the lexicon,and an utteranceinvolvesa shift of lexical meaning

wheneverthere is a change in the selectionwithin a class (e.g., from "That
bird"to "Thatbear").Structuralmeaningsmay perhapsbe definedas those
that shift wheneverthere is a change in the selectionswithin the formula.
Thus if we shift from the first major sentence route to the second, there
seemsto be a shift from demonstrativenaming ("Therebird"or "Seeboat")
to predication("Bird all gone" or "Bearfall down"). If we shift from not
selecting ? to selecting it, we shift from a declarationto an interrogation.
It is more difficultto say what the changesof meaningcould be that go with
selectingor not selecting the variousoptional classes.
Testing the Adequacyof a Grammar

In our discussionof techniquesfor the discoveryof a grammarwe have
repeatedlypointed to the existence of equally reasonablealternativedeci-
sions. The arbitrarinessof choice could be somewhat reduced by taking a
larger corpus. However, we are sure that the best-foundedgrammarwill
not be uniquely determinedbut will only be a good provisionaltry. The
same thing is surely true for the rules a child induces from adult speech;
they will be hypothesesabout the form of future speech events. Is there
any way to check such hypotheses?
Very roughly the test of a grammarmust be the same as the test of any
theory of empiricalevents-the ability to make correctpredictions.In the
present case this means the ability to anticipate sentences that have not
enteredinto the constructionof the grammar.One might, for example,have
tested our grammarfor Eve by taking a second large collection of utter-
ances on the following day or days and seeing how many of those that
occur were predicted.
Three different kinds of successful prediction may be distinguished.
There is, in the first place, occurrenceof an utterancethat has alreadyoc-
curred in the corpus from which the grammarwas induced. This sort of
occurrencedoes not help to validatethe grammaras a set of generalizations
that go beyond the data; the occurrenceof a familiar sentencecould have
been predictedfrom a simple list of sentencesin the original corpus.There
is, in the second place, the occurrenceof an utterancenot included in the
originalcorpusbut allowed for by the generalizedrules. For example,Eve's
recorddid not include the sentence "There horsie" though it did include
"That horsie" and "The horsie." By adopting the general rule that any
class 2 word can follow any class i word, the utterance"There horsie"is
predicted.If it occurs,that fact would increaseour confidencein the gen-
eralization.
Suppose that, in a second corpus collected from Eve, we obtained the
utterance"That lion." The word lion did not occur in the original corpus,
and so the utterancewas not predicted.It is not to be expectedthat a speech
sample of only 500 utteranceswould exhaust a lexicon, and it would be
unreasonableto permit incompletenessof lexicon to discredita grammar.
It would be betterto say that an utterancedoes not come within the prov-
ince of a grammarunless all of its words are includedin the lexicon of the
grammar-the lexicon being the lists of forms belonging to each syntactic
class. Therefore, the sentence "That lion" counts neither for nor against
the grammar.However, the occurrenceof this sentenceenables us to add
lion to the class 2 list since the criterion for inclusion is occurrence after
a class i word and that is such a word. Subsequentutterancessuch as
"There lion" and "The lion" could be counted as evidence for the gram-
mar since they are predictedonce lion has been added to the lexicon.
We cannotthink of any way to set a definitecriterionas to the number
of sentences,out of a collectionof obtainedsentences,that must be predicted
for a grammarto be judged acceptable.It is clear,however,that the number
of successfulpredictionscan be increasedby simply writing the grammar
in the most generalterms possible.We found, you recall,that the forms all
gone, broken,fall down, and tired all occurredafter class2 words (Table 8).
Looking more closelyat Table 8, we found that the word brokenoccurred
only after the names of inanimatethings and tired only after the names of
animate things. This fractionof the grammarcould have been written in
either of the two forms presentedin Table I2. The less general form pre-
dicts 39 utterances,and the more general predictsthese 39 plus 13 others.
The more general will make all of the successfulpredictionsmade by the
less general and has the possibilityof making some that the less general
cannot make. The way to write a "successful"grammar, if "success"is
simplymeasuredby the predictionof obtainedevents,is to write a grammar
that predictsevery conceivablesequenceof obtainedforms.
The job of a grammar,however,is to predictsentencesthat are possible
while not predictingsentencesthat are impossible.This second part of the
job gives an additional criterion of evaluation that will prevent us from
always preferringthe most general grammar.That grammaris to be pre-
ferredwhich predictswhat occurswhile predictingas little as possiblethat
TABLE 12
Alternative Forms for a Fragment of Eve's Grammar
a. TheMoreGeneralForm
Utterance -) C2 - C4
Mummy,
C2 -) baby,bird,carriage,chair,doggie,dollie,eyebrow,kitty,microphone,
reel,rocker,something
C4 - all gone,broken,fall.down,tired
b. The More RestrictiveForm
C2 + C5
Utterance -> Can. + tired
C2 inan. + broken
C2 -) baby,bird, carriage,chair, doggie, dollie, eyebrow,kitty, microphone,

Mummy,reel,rocker,something
C2 an -- baby,bird,doggie,dollie, kitty,mummy
C2 nan. - carriage,chair,eyebrow,microphone, reel, rocker,something
C5
- all gone, fall down
does not occur. Therefore, the less general grammar will be better than the
more general if it is equally successful in predicting what happens. A
grammar should stay as close to the obtained materials as is consistent with
generalizing beyond the obtained materials so as to predict future events.
Only by invoking both criteria can we hope to obtain distinct grammars
representing a developmental sequence. Our next step in this research pro-
gram will be an empirical and logical study of techniques for evaluating
grammars in terms of their predictive powers. (See Brown, Fraser, and
Bellugi.)
In sum, the most that we are now able to conceive by way of grammar-
evaluating techniques is a set of rough criteria for preferring one version
to another. This problem of evaluation probably exists in implicit form for
the child learning to speak. How does he judge the adequacy of his induc-
tions? He can see how well they anticipate what others say. He can con-
struct new utterances and see whether others appear to find them acceptable
and comprehensible. He can ask direct metalinguistic questions: "Mother,
can one say 'The carriage is tired'?"
CHILD GRAMMARAS A REDUCTIONOF ADULT GRAMMAR
The provisional grammar we have written for Eve is not a grammar of

adult English. Most of the utterances it generates are not, for us, gram-
matical sentences.We cannot accept "That horsie"or "Kitty all gone" or
"ThereMummyhair"or "Two chair."Words that seem to be syntactically
equivalentfor Eve are not so for us. For example, the words see and that
are membersof class i for Eve and equivalent in that they can precede
class2 wordssuch as doggie, dollie, etc. For the adult who might say "That
is a doggie"and "I see a doggie,"that and see are syntacticallyunlike. For
Eve the word two is roughly equivalent to the and a, but that is because
she does not pluralizecount nouns. It is clearthat Eve does not speak adult
English, and so we cannot use an adult English grammarto describeher
speech. It would be quite misleading to list Eve's that as a demonstrative
pronounand her see as a transitiveverbthough that is a correctclassification
of these words in adult English.
Since the speech of the younger children in our set of 13 is clearlynot
English, it is necessaryto "discover"the grammarthat is implied by their
utterances.We have not in this first try collectedlarge enough corpusesto
write convincinggrammars.However, for the youngerchildrenit does look
as if we might manage with about 1500 differentutterancesto get a good
provisional grammar. The prospect of "discovering"grammars for the
older children is not nearly so good. Since the older children have larger
vocabulariesand longer utterances,there is less of the recurrencethat is the
basis of a structuralanalysis. The anthropologicallinguist who wants to
describeadult usage in an unfamiliarlanguage is likely to try something
like i,ooo hours of speech,and there are times when we fear that not very
much less than this would sufficefor children of about 3 years.
The speechof the children in our collectionwho are nearly 3 years old
is mostly English. They produceacceptablesimple sentences.Furthermore,
these simplesentencescorrespondvery well with the set of English sentences
for which a satisfactorygenerativegrammarhas been written by Chomsky
(1957) and Lees (I960). For these records,then, it does not seem necessary
to "discover"the grammar; it is quite reasonableto analyze them in terms
of the syntacticcategoriesof the adult grammar.We have done this job,
classifying utterancesunder headings: copular sentences, transitive verb
sentences,intransitiveverb sentences,sentenceswith modal auxiliaries,sen-
tences with progressives,sentenceswith preliminaryverbs,imperatives,neg-
atives, Wh-interrogatives,Yes-No interrogatives,and unclassifiablefrag-
ments.
When this analysisin terms of an adult grammarhad been done for
the most advancedrecords,we realized that it could, with some additional
assumptions,be extended to the recordsof all the other children. For the
striking fact about the utterancesof the younger children, when they are
approachedfrom the vantagepoint of adult grammar,is that they are almost
all classifiableas grammaticalsentencesfrom which certainmorphemeshave
been omitted. You may have noticed that while Eve's sentences are not
grammatically"complete"they are somehow intelligible as abbreviatedor
telegraphicversionsof familiar constructions."Mummyhair" and "Daddy

car" seem only to omit the possessiveinflection.Both "Chairbroken"and
"That horsie" become acceptablecopular sentencesif we leave the word-
order intact and fill in is and a or the. We have, therefore,analyzed all
of the recordsin terms of English simple sentencesby assigning each utter-
ance to the sentence-typeit most closely approximates.
We have not yet hit on any good techniquesfor summarizingour com-
pendious data, but one illustrativetable (Table I3) will make a few im-
TABLE13
Estimatesof MeanUtteranceLengthand Reportson SelectedGrammatical
Formsfor 13 Children
MeanNumber Be in Modal Auxiliaries

Name of Child Age in Months Morphemes* Progressive will or can
Andy ........ 26 2.0 no no

Betty ........ 3I /2 2.1 no no
Charlie ...... 22 2.2 no no
Adam ....... 28 /2 2.5 no no
Eve ......... 25/2 2.6 no no
Fanny ....... 31 z 3.2 yes no
Grace ....... 27 3.5 yes yes
Helen ....... 30 3.6 yes yes
Ian .......... 33.8 yes yes
June ........ 35/2 4.5 yes yes
Kathy ....... 30 / 4.8 yes yes
Larry ........ 35/2 4.8 yes yes
Jimmy ....... 32 4.9 yes yes
* Mean count from 0oo consecutive utterances.
portantpoints. For each child we made an estimateof the mean length of

utterancesby counting morphemesfrom Ioo consecutiveutterancesoccur-
ring in midmorning.From this count we thought it wise to omit the single-
word rejoindersand exclamations:No, Ok, Yeah, and Oh since these are
sometimesemitted many times in successionby speakersof any age, and
if the small utterancesample happenedto include such a repeatingcircuit
the estimate would be very unrepresentative.The estimates appear in
Table 13, and the children'snamesappearin an orderof increasingaverage
utterancelength. This order is related to the chronologicalage order but
not identicalwith it. An age-relatedincreasein the mean length of utter-
ances is, of course, one of the best establishedfacts in the study of child
speech (McCarthy, 1954). There is, however, no reason to expect perfect
correspondencewith age. We conceive of developmentalsequence as a
Guttman scale with performancesfollowing an invariant order but not
TABLE 14
Imitations of Spoken Sentences
ModelSentence Eve, 25 /2 Adam, 28 /z Helen, 30 lan, 31 /z
I. I showed you the book. I show book. (I show) book. C I show you the bo
2. I am very tall......... (My) tall. I (very) tall. I very tall. I'm very tall.
3. It goes in a big box ... Big box. Big box. In big box. It goes in the box.
4. Read the book. ....... Read book. Read book. Read (a) book.
5. I am drawing a dog ... Drawing dog. I draw dog. I drawing dog. Dog.
6. I will read the book ... Read book. I will read book. I read the book. I read the book.
7. I can see a cow. ...... See cow. I want see cow. C Cow.
8. I will not do that again. Do again. I will that again. I do that. I again.
9. I do not want an apple. I do apple. I do a apple. I do not want app
Io. Do I like to read books? To read book? I read books? I read books? I read book?
II. Is it a car? ........... 't car? Is it car? Car? That a car?
12. Where does it go? .... Where go? Go? Does it go? Where do it go?
13. Where shall I go? ..... Go? C
NOTE.-C means imitation correct. - indicates that no intelligible imitation was obtained. ( ) i
74 OF LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
pegged to particularages. The sequencecan be coveredat varying rates of
speed; the rate would be a function of intelligence and learning oppor-
tunities.
When the analyzed records are ordered by mean utterancelength, it
becomes apparentthat children all "reduce"English sentences in similar
fashion. If the utterancesof one child are, on the average,shorterthan the
utterancesof anotherchild, then, of course,the first child will be omitting
some morphemesthat the second child is producing.However, utterances
could be shortenedby omitting any morphemesat all; thereare many ways
to abbreviatesentences,and it is perfectlyconceivablethat individualchildren
would hit on differentways. They do not do so. We have checkedall the rec-
ords for progressiveconstructions(e.g., "I am going to town"). Without ex-
ception,children whose mean utterancelength is below 3.2 form this con-
structionby omitting the forms of the verb to be (e.g., "I going"). We have
checkedsentencesin which the verb would, for an adult, ordinarilyrequire
such a modal auxiliaryas will or can (e.g., "I will park the car"). Children
whose mean utterancelength is below 3.5 invariablyform these sentencesby
omitting modals ("I park the car"or "I go outside"or "I make a tower").
In general, it appearsthat children whose speech is not yet English are
using grammarswhich are systematicderivativesof adult grammar and
that the particularfeaturesof the derivativegrammarare predictablefrom
the mean length of utterance.
The abbreviationeffect can be more directly studied in the utterances
a child produceswhen he is asked to repeat back a sentence said by an
adult. For the last six cases we presented 13 simple sentencesof various
TABLE 15
Summaryof Resultswith SentenceImitations
Number of Morphemes Imitated Cor- M

rectly in Each of Three Serial Positions Mean Lengtion
Imitations
Name and Age of Child Initial Middle Final (in morphemes)
Eve, 25 .................... 4 5 I2 2.2

Adam, 28 2 ................... 9 3 12 3.1
Helen, 30 .................... 6 8 9 3.7
Ian, 31 / .................... 9 7 12 3-5
Jimmy, 32 .................... 12 1 13 5.0
June, 35/2 ................... 12 13 13 4.9
Per cent correctlyimitated ....... 70% 64% 96%
Mean length of model sentences .. 5.2
NOTE.-The difference between initial and final positions is significant by sign test
(two-tailed) with p = .032; the difference between middle and final positions is signifi-
cant with p = .062; the difference between initial and middle positions is not significant.
grammaticaltypes and ask the subject to "Say what I say." Half of the
sentenceswere presentedat the end of the morning session and half at the
end of the afternoonsession.For each child a differentrandom order was
presented.The sentenceswere spoken slowly and carefullyand always by
the same investigator.The child had the microphonedirectly in front of
him, and so good recordingswere made. Table 14 presentsthe first efforts
of each child, and Tables 15 and I6 a summaryof the main results.
TABLE 16
PercentagesCorrectlyImitated of Morphemesin Various SyntacticClasses
SyntacticClass CorrectlyImitated
ClassesHaving Few Membersin English
Inflections ................................................ 44%
Pronouns .................................................. 72
Articles .................................................. 39
Modal auxiliaries ......................... ............ 56
Copular verbs (to be) ....................................... 33
ClassesHaving Many Membersin English
Nouns ................................................... 100
Adjectives ................................................ 92
Main verbs ............................................... 85
NoTE.-Using tests for differences between two percentages, the percentage correct in
each of the classes with many members is significantlygreater than the percentagecorrect
in any of the classes with few members (p < .ooI, 2-tailed test).
With increasingage, children produce more imitations that are mor-

phemically identical with the original. With increasing age, the imitative
utterances produced include larger numbers of morphemes-approaching
the numbers in the model sentences. The morphemes produced are invari-
ably in their original order. Omissions do not appear to be random or idio-
syncratic. On the contrary, it looks as if, across children and across sentences,
there is a consistent tendency to retain one kind of morpheme and drop
another kind. The two sorts of morphemes contrast on several correlated
dimensions. The morphemes most likely to be retained are: morphemes
that occur in final position in the sentence; morphemes that are reference-
making forms; morphemes that belong mainly to the large and expandable
noun, verb, and adjective parts-of-speech;6 morphemes that are relatively
unpredictable from the context; and morphemes that receive the heavier
stresses in ordinary English pronunciation. The morphemes least likely to
6Aborn and Rubenstein (1956) have published evidence that, in six-word sentences,
nouns are most frequent in final sentence position whereas function words tend to be
most frequent in the fourth and fifth positions. This tie between position and part-of-
speech is found also, and not by our intention, in the sentences we provided for imitation.
be retained are: morphemes that occur in intermediatepositions in the
sentence; morphemes that are not reference-makingforms; morphemes
that belong to such small-sizedgrammaticalcategoriesas the articles,modal
auxiliaries,and inflections;morphemesthat are relativelypredictablefrom
context and so carry little information; and morphemesthat receive the
weaker stressesin ordinaryEnglish pronunciation.This does indeed seem
to be telegraphicEnglish. There is substantialsupportfor our findings in
the resultswith sentencerepetitionfor Ioo childrenat ages 2 and 3 obtained
by Gesell and his associates(I940) and also in work of Stutsman(1926).
Let us suppose that very young children speak a rather uniform tele-
graphicEnglish. How do they come by it? It is conceivablethat they hear
it from adults, that they are imitating a "babytalk" which is an adult in-
vention. We have on our tapes a large quantity of speech from mother to
child, and, while this materialhas not yet been transcribedor analyzed, it
is quite clear that Eve's mother and the mothers of the other children do
not usually use telegraphicEnglish. The very young children are exposed
to a much more complicatedgrammarthan they use and the older children
to a somewhatmore complicatedgrammarthan they use.
While it seems safe to say that children do not learn their telegraphic
English from adults, it is probablyalso safe to say that the average adult
can do a good job of producingtelegraphicEnglish if he is asked to talk
like a baby.We have even heard a 3-year-olddrop his more mature gram-
mar in speaking to a 2-year-oldand produce a very good version of the
2-year-old'sspeech. It is an old observationof linguists that the "baby
talk" version of a language is very uniform from one adult to another.
We can see good reasonswhy this should be so. If there is somethingabout
the operationof the child mind that causeseach child to "reduce"English
in a similarform, then adults everywherecould learn the same sort of baby
talk from their own children. It is even possible,of course, that baby talk
in all languagesshows certainstablefeatures,e.g., omissionof low-informa-
tion, predictableforms. If, in addition,baby talk is a systematictransforma-
tion of adult simple sentencesaccomplishedby the omissionof certainkinds
of words,then an adult should be able to throw some simple mental switch
that activatesthe baby grammar.
A basic factor causing the child's reductionof adult sentencesis surely
an upper limit on some kind of immediatememory span for the situation
in which the child is imitating and a similar limit of programmingspan
for the situationin which the child is constructingsentences.A comparison
of the mean lengths of utterancesproduced as imitations (presented in
Table I5) with the mean lengths of spontaneouslyproduced utterances
from the same children (presented in Table 13) shows that the paired
values are very close and that neither is consistentlyhigher. An increasing
span for random digits is so reliably related to increasingage as to be a
partof the Stanford-Binettest (e.g., a span of two digits at 30 months,three
at 36, four at 54 months are the norms). Munn summarizesthe resultsof
many studiesby saying: "That the memory span of children increaseswith
age has been shown for all kinds of materialinvestigated"(1954, p. 413).
We know from Blankenship'sreview of memory span work (1938) and
from Miller'sdiscussionof "the magical number seven" (1956) that it is
not yet possibleto reduce the variousmeasuresof span to a common unit
(bits) and therebyreconcilevariationsin the data. But there does seem to
be ample indicationthat one-or-morememoryspans show a steady increase
in early childhood. It is this limitation of span in children for which the
work of the descriptivelinguistprovidedno parallel,and our obsessionwith
linguistic technique long diverted us from recognizing the systematically
derivativenatureof child speech.
Span limitation is probablythe factor compelling children to reduce
adult sentences,but it does not, of course, accountfor the systematictend-
ency to drop one sort of morphemeand retain another sort. Because the
two sorts of morphemesdiffer in numerous correlatedrespects,there are
many conceivableexplanationsfor the child's selective performance,and
this will be so until the variablesare experimentallyseparated.Here are a
few of the many ways in which the storycan now be put together.Perhaps
the human mind operateson an unlearned"recency"principle,and English
sentences(maybe also sentencesin other languages) are nicely adaptedto
this principle in that the least predictable,most informative words fall
usually into the final position. Perhaps,on the other hand, the "recency"
effect in human serial learning is an acquired tendency to pay particular
attention to material in final position, a tendency acquired from the fact
that sentencesare so constructedas to place in that position words carrying
a lot of information.Perhapsit is differentialstress that selects what the
child will reproduceand sentencesare nicely adaptedto this predilectionin
that the heavierstressesfall on the less predictableforms. Or perhapsit is
some combinationof these ideas.
CONCLUSION
This paper began with an argument that the correctEnglish sentences

producedby a child are not good evidence that he possessesconstruction
rules for the reason that we can never be sure that a correct sentence is
not directly copied from a model. It seemed to us that systematicerrors
and manipulationof inventedwords were betterevidence,as a child is not
likely to have had exact models for these. In the secondsectionof the paper
we discussed techniques for inducing constructionrules or a generative
grammarfrom the child'snaturalspeech.Since this speech,for Eve at least,
is not good English, it can be argued that she had no models for it and so
it is legitimateto infer rules from such data. In the third section,however,
we have seen that child speech can be rather well characterizedas a sys-
78 OF LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
tematic reductionof adult speech, and so, after all, there were models for
Eve's sentences.She could have learnedmost of them by selectiveimitation
if not by imitation per se.
Eventuallychildren must do more than imitate and memorize if only
becausethere is not enough time for them to learn as particularverbalre-
sponsesall the sentencesthey will be able as adults to produceand evaluate
as to grammaticality.(For a detailedstatementof this argument,see Bruner,
1957, p. I56; or Miller, Galanter, and Pribram, I960, pp. 146-147.) In addi-
tion to the logical argument that children must learn constructionrules
in view of their terminal linguistic achievement,there is much empirical
evidence that children older than Eve do, in fact, learn constructionrules.
Some of this evidence is availableto every parent in a child's systematic
errors(sheeps,I bringed,etc.), and some of it has been collectedin a con-
trolled fashion by Berko (1958) and by Brown and Berko (I960).
While children must and do eventuallyinduce constructionrules, it is
not necessarythat they do so from the very earliestage at which words are
combined.Eve, after all, is not yet preparedto producean infinite set of
sentences,nor, so far as we know, is she able to distinguishall grammatical
sequencesfrom ungrammaticalsequences.It is possiblethat for the earliest
linguistic accomplishmentsone sort of learning theory will serve-a theory
developedlargely from the study of animal behavior-while for later ac-
complishmentsa completely different theory will be necessary-a theory
permitting the inductive formation of syntacticclasses that generalize far
beyondobtainedinformation.However, it is also possiblethat the induction
of rules goes on from the very first. Eve, for example,producessuch utter-
ances as "Two chair" and "Kitty all gone" which could conceivablybe
either direct or selectiveimitations,but might very easily be constructions
resultingfrom overgeneralizedrules for the use of two and all gone. For a
single example,we will show how Eve might be forming constructionrules
at the same time that she is practicingselectiveimitation without this con-
structionprocessbeing clearlyrevealedin the presentdata.
Selective reductionmight cause Eve to imitate "That is a doggie" as
"That doggie"; "That is a horsie"as "That horsie";and "See the doggie"
as "See doggie." At this point induction could operateand she might, be-
causethe context"That "is sharedby "doggie"and "horsie,"assume
that the othercontext"See "can be sharedand so form the utterance
"See horsie."It is quite possiblethat the child reducesfirst, then forms in-
ductive generalizations,and makes new utteranceson the model of his
reductions.
It will often happen if the above suggestionis correctthat a child will
find forms syntacticallyequivalentthat are not so for the adult. SupposeEve
heard the sentence "I see the man" and reduced it to "See man." The
original demonstratesthe nonequivalenceof see and that since see occurs
after a pronoun, and, in addition, the original version does not justify
adding man to the list started with doggie and horsie. The reduced
sentence, on the other hand, leaves see equivalent to that and suggests
that man belongs with doggie and horsie. If a child induces a gram-
mar from its own reduced sentences,it should generallylose the distribu-
tional detail provided by such morphemesas an, the, will, do, and /-z/.
The result would be syntactic classes not identical with those of adult
speech, few in number and large in size. In addition there would be loss
of numerous semantic distinctions,e.g., the difference between "See the
man" and "I see the man." It is importantto note, however,that the gross
sense of a sentencewill usuallybe retained; e.g., in "See man" as in "I see
the man" it is clearthat man is the objectof seeing. The crude sense of the
sentenceis generallyrecoverablefrom the child's reductionfor the reason
that one profound dimension of English grammar is perfectly preserved
in telegraphese,and that dimensionis word order.
For the present, then, we are working with the hypothesisthat child
speech is a systematicreduction of adult speech largely accomplishedby
omitting function words that carry little information.From this corpus of
reduced sentences we suggest that the child induces general rules which
govern the constructionof new utterances.As a child becomes capable
(through maturation and the consolidation of frequently occurring se-
quences) of registeringmore of the detail of adult speech,his originalrules
will have to be revisedand supplemented.As the generativegrammargrows
more complicatedand more like the adult grammar,the child's speechwill
become capableof expressinga greatervariety of meanings.
EXPLORATIONS IN GRAMMAR EVALUATION1
ROGERBROWN,COLIN FRASER,2
and URSULABELLUGI
HarvardUniversity
In the I96I edition of Gleason'sAn Introductionto Descriptive Lin-

guistics the following paragraphappears:
The differencebetweena descriptionof a corpusand of a languageis
partlya matterof scope.A corpusconsistsof a few thousandsentences.A
languagemightbe consideredas consistingof a very largenumberof sen-
tences-all those,eitheralreadyspokenor not yet used,whichwouldbe ac-
1 The work describedin this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation
by a grant administered through the Center for Communication Sciences, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
2 Now at the University of Exeter, Exeter, England.

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The Acquisition of Syntax

Author(s): Roger Brown and Colin Fraser

THE ACQUISITION OF SYNTAX'

What is done in a developmentalstudy of behaviordepends upon the

Now there is another one.

FIGURE 1-Illustrationof Berko's

INDUCINGA GRAMMARFROMA CORPUS

Before collecting any data, we studied English grammar in its more

that by 3 yearsmany childrenhad aboutas complexa grammaras we were

Methodsfor Discoveringa ProvisionalGrammar

4 The generative grammar, as

Total Contexts of "Mum"

Total Contextsof "Dad"

Total Contexts of "Here"

Total Contexts of "There"

other word and tentativesyntacticclassesset up so as to put togetherwords

Two-Word Utteranceswith RecurrentInitial Words from Eve

NOTE.-"-+" indicates that utterancesof this type occurred.

NorE.-{ } means a choice of one of the contained sequences.

Table 3 constitutesa list of differentutterances:each is listed just once.

may properlybe filled-they are utteranceswe should expect to hear from

A Grammarthat Results from Filling In the Blanks in Table 3

C1 -- A, Daddy, Mummy, 's, See, That, The, There, Two

a. Eve's Grammarwith the Articles SeparatedOut

C1 -) Daddy, Mummy, 's, See, That, There, Two

b. Eve's GrammarAllowing for Possessives

NOTE.-( ) means that selection of the enclosed is optional.

The optional markings in Table 6a indicate that a class can be com-

a. Utteranceswith the or a in Middle Position

bird'). An adult might form the vocative version as a kind of ellipsis of

Baby ................... tired

be producedby an adult. As to whether Eve would say it, we cannot tell

a. Eve's Grammarwith Two Basic Sentence-Types

C1 - 's, See, That, There, Two

b. Eve's Grammarwith Articles Added to the New Sentence-Type

NOTE.- { } means a choice of one of the contained sequences.

The grammar of Table 9b does not represent the distributional distinc-

Utterancesthat Have Occurredin DeclarativeForm*

*Utterances that have occurred without rising interrogativeintonation.

There remains a collection of utterancesbelonging to types already

Complete ProvisionalGrammarfor Eve

C1 -> 's, See, That, There, Two

listings are the lexicon,and an utteranceinvolvesa shift of lexical meaning

Testing the Adequacyof a Grammar

Alternative Forms for a Fragment of Eve's Grammar

b. The More RestrictiveForm

C2 -) baby,bird, carriage,chair, doggie, dollie, eyebrow,kitty, microphone,

CHILD GRAMMARAS A REDUCTIONOF ADULT GRAMMAR

The provisional grammar we have written for Eve is not a grammar of

telegraphicversionsof familiar constructions."Mummyhair" and "Daddy

MeanNumber Be in Modal Auxiliaries

Andy ........ 26 2.0 no no

portantpoints. For each child we made an estimateof the mean length of

Imitations of Spoken Sentences

ModelSentence Eve, 25 /2 Adam, 28 /z Helen, 30 lan, 31 /z

Summaryof Resultswith SentenceImitations

Number of Morphemes Imitated Cor- M

Eve, 25 .................... 4 5 I2 2.2

PercentagesCorrectlyImitated of Morphemesin Various SyntacticClasses

With increasingage, children produce more imitations that are mor-

This paper began with an argument that the correctEnglish sentences

EXPLORATIONS IN GRAMMAR EVALUATION1

In the I96I edition of Gleason'sAn Introductionto Descriptive Lin-