The Development of

Syntax and Morphology:

Learning the Structure
of Language
By: Erika Hof

About the Author

Some Features of Adults Knowledge of
Language Structure
An Overview of Grammatical Development
Early Multiword Utterances
After Telegraphic Speech
Individual Diferences in Grammatical
Development
Measuring Grammatical Development
The development of Comprehension of
Structured speech
What is the Nature of Childrens Grammars
Issues in Explaining the Acquisition of Grammar

About the Author

Erika Hof

A professor of Psychology at Florida

Atlantic University.

She has also taught courses on language

development at the University of
Winsconsin Parkside and, as guest
instructor, at the University of Jyvskyl,
Finland.

She has held visiting scholar positions at

Marquette University (Milwaukee), McGill
University, and the National Institute of
Child and Human Development.

Dr. Hof holds an M.S. in psychology

from Rutgers The state University of
New Jersey (1976) and a Ph.D. in
psychology from the University of
Michigan (1981).

She conducts research on the process of

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

Dr. Hofs research has been published in

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

Some Features of Adults

Knowledge of Language
Structure

Productivity of Language

This characteristics of knowledge and

language of knowledge ----- that
speakers and hearers have the capacity
to produce and understand an infinite
number of novel sentences.

Generativity of Language

Syntax

is the component of grammar that

governs the ordering of words in
sentences.

Syntactic Rules

John kissed Mary,

Sentence

John + kissed + Mary

Sentence

agent of action + action +

recipient of action

Sentence

Noun + Verb + Noun

Some more Information About Adults

Syntactic Knowledge

Kinds of categories rules operate over

Kinds of structures the rules build

Kinds of Categories Rules Operate Over

Open-class words, content words,

or lexical categories

consists of noun, verb, and adjective

The words in these categories do most

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

(e.g., the blick gorped the fepish

woog.)

The closed-class words, also called

function words or functional
categories

These are auxiliaries like can and will,

prepositions like in and of,
complementers like that and who, and
determiners like the and a.

They are called closed-class words

because you cant really invent new
one, and they are called function words
or functional categories because their
main role in the sentence is to serve
grammatical functions rather than to
carry content.

Kinds of Structures the Rules Build

This feature about grammatical

knowledge concerns the nature of
sentence structure. Sentences are not
merely linear arrangements of content
and function words: They have
hierarchical structure.

John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln.

A Confederate sympathizer shot the 16th

president.

The clever runner stole second base .

The catcher swore.

Sentence

Verb Phrase

Noun Phrase
Noun

Noun Phrase + Verb Phrase

Verb + ( Noun Phrase)

(Determiner) + (Adjective) +

These rules say that a sentence is made up of a

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

Complex sentences are formed by

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

Example:

The catcher swore.

The umpire noticed that the catcher

swore.

The crowd saw that the umpire noticed

that the catcher swore.

Morphology

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

Grammatical Morphology, also known as

Inflectional Morphology

Inflectional Morphology

--- add grammatical category to

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

--- This is in contrast to derivational

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

Examples include the s that goes on the

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

The form of a noun is diferent

depending not only on whether the
noun is singular or plural but also on
whether the noun is the subject of the
sentence, the direct object, or the
indirect object----and that would be just
part of the morphological system.

Compare the following English and

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

Descriptive versus Prescriptive Rules

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

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

try

Me and Tifany went to the mall.

*mall the to went me Tifany and

The study of language acquisition is the

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

An Overview of
Grammatical
Development

Our Task in this Chapter

To fill in and supplement this sketchy outline

To begin with what has historically been the

primary database for describing grammatical
development: the utterances children
produce

To describe the transition from single-word

speech to the production of word
combinations

To follow the course of development in

production through to the production of
complete sentences

To turn to the topics of individual

diferences in the course of
development in production and the
measurement of grammatical
development.

To review studies of comprehension for

further evidence of what children know
about the grammar of their language at
diferent developmental points.

To look at the theoretical in the field

regarding how to describe childrens
linguistic knowledge at the diferent
points in development and how to
account for the changes that occur.

Early Multiword
Utterances

Transitional forms

Transition from One-Word Speech

Two-Word Combination

Three-Word and More Combinations

The Telegraphic Nature of Early

Combinatorial Speech

The Transition from One-Word Speech

Vertical Constructions

Example, One little girl who woke up with an aye

infection pointed to her eye and said, Ow. Eye
(personal data).

Scollon (1979) called these sequences vertical

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

Unanalyzed Word Combinations

and Word + Jargon Combinations
--- Unanalyzed wholes
--- Ex. Iwant and Idontknow
--- Jargon
--- Ex. mumble mumble mumble
cookie?

Two-word Combinations

The Beginning of a Productive System

--- Example, he could say that anything is big

or little; he could say that daddy and Andrew
walk and sleep.
--- To introduce this little boy to a new person,
Emily. If his linguistic knowledge were
productive, he should immediately be able to
produce Emily sit, Emily walk, and so on.

Examples of one childs two-word

utterances
Possessives
daddy cofee Andrew book daddy book
daddy shell daddy car mommy book
mommy shell daddy chairMommy butter
Property-indicating patterns
big balloon
big hot
big shell

little shell
little ham
little water

all wet mommy

all wet
daddy all wet

Recurrence, number, disappearance

more glass two plane
more boy
two stick
more raisins two ducks

one daddy car

all gone big stick
all gone stick

Locatives
sand ball ON hand eye IN/TO
hand hair IN stone outside TO
rock outside TO dog house ON
Actor/action
mommy sit daddy work boy walk
daddy sit daddy sleep man walk
Andrew walk daddy walk Elliot sleep
Other combinations
have it egg
dirty face
boom-boom tower

eat fork
back eat
broke pipe daddy boy
window byebye butter honey

Meanings in Two-Word Utterances

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

---Example, in the utterance my teddy,

the word my refers to the speaker and the
word teddy refers to a stufed
animal. The
relational meaning is that of possession.

Relational meanings expressed in childrens two

word utterances

Meaning
Example
agent + action
daddy sit
action + object
drive car
agent +object
Mommy sock
agent + location
sit chair
entity + location
toy floor
possessor + possession
my teddy
entity + attribute
crayon big
demonstrative + entity
this telephone

Three- Word And More Combinations

Example, the sentence I watch it

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

Two characteristics of these early

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

---2. Certain types of words and bound

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

The Telegraphic Nature of Early

Combinatorial Speech

These missing forms are called

grammatical morphemes because
the use of these words and word
endings is tied to particular grammatical
entities.

Example, the and a can appear only at

the beginning of a noun phrase; ing is
typically attached to a verb.

Why these grammatical functors (i.e. function words)

and inflections are omitted is a matter of some
debate.

1. The omitted words and morphemes

are not produced because they are not
essential to meaning.
2. Children probably have cognitive
limitations on the length of utterance they
can produce, independent of their
grammatical knowledge. Given such
limitations ,
they may sensibly leave
out the last important parts.

3. It is also true that the omitted words

tend to be words that are not stressed
in
adults utterances, and children may be
leaving out unstressed elements
(Demuth,
1994).
4. Childrens underlying knowledge at this
point does not include the
grammatical
categories that govern the use of the omitted
forms, although other evidence suggests it
does.

After Telegraphic Speech

Morphological development in children

acquiring English

This transition takes quite a long time.

Although the first grammatical
morphemes typically appear with the
first three-word utterances, most
grammatical morphemes are not
reliably used until a more than a year
later, when children are speaking in
long, complex sentences.

The acquisition of grammatical morphemes

is not an all-or-none phenomenon -----either for the morphemes as a group or
even at level of individual morphemes.
Diferent morphemes first appear at
diferent times, and a long period of time
passes between the first time a morpheme
is used and the time it is reliably used in
contexts where it is obligatory.

The order in which the 14 diferent

morphemes are acquired is very similar
across diferent children. Brown found
that Adam, Eve, and Sarah acquired
these 14 morphemes in similar orders,
although their rates of development
were quite diferent.

Fourteen grammatical morphemes and their

order of acquisitions
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

present progressive (+ ing)

in
on
plural (+ s)
past irregular (e.g., came, went)
possessive (+s)
uncontractible copula (am, is, are ,was,

were)

8. article (a, the)

9. past regular (+d )
10. third-person regular (+s; e.g., she talks)ss

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

12. uncontractible auxiliary (am, is, are, has, have)
13. contractible copula (m, s, re)
14. contractible auxiliary (m, s, re when
combined with + ing; ve, s when combined with a
past participle such as has been)

Morphological development in children

acquiring languages other than English

Example, where the child learning English

needs merely to learn that subjects precede
and objects follow the verb, the child
learning Hungarian must learn to make 18
diferent distinctions among roles of nouns
and to add a diferent suffix to the noun
depending on the it serves.

In English one says John kissed the girl

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

Morphemes are easy to acquire when they

are frequent and have a reconizable form.

Are fixed position relative to the stem they

attach to and a clear function.

Are easy to segment from the stem and if

the rhythm of the language makes the
morphemes perceptually salient.

Language with inflectional systems that both

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

The development of diferent sentence forms

Expressing negation

Asking questions

Using passive forms

Producing complex sentence

Expressing Negation

Childrens negative sentence forms, in order of

development
1. Sentences with external negative marker
No wipe finger
No the sun shining
No mitten
Wear mitten no
2. Constructions with external negative marker but
auxiliaries
I cant see you
I dont like you
I no want envelope
3.Constructions with auxiliaries
I didnt did it
Donna wont let go
No, it isnt

no

Asking Questions

Kinds of Question

Yes/no questions can be answered with

either yes or no.

Wh- questions begin with wh- words

such as who, where, what, why,
or when, and also include how.

Childrens question forms, in order of

development
Yes/no questions _ Wh- questions
1.Constructions with Mommy eggnog? Who that?
external question marker I ride train? What cowboy doing?
Sit chair? Where milk go?
What a bandaid is?
2.Constructions with Does the kitty stand up? Where the other Joe will
drive?
auxiliaries----but no subject Oh, did I caught it? What you did say?
auxiliary inversion in wh-- Will you help me? Why kitty can,t questions
stand up?
3. subject-auxiliary What did you do?
Inversion in wh-questions What does like?
whiskey taste

Using passive forms

When the speaker wishes to make the

object of the verb prominent.

When the speaker does not wish to

specify the agent of the action at all.

Passives that use the verb to be (e.g., It can be

putten on your foot) are more frequent than get
passives (e.g., He got punished) , and these two
forms of passives tend to be used to express diferent
sorts of meanings-----both by adults and by children
from the time they first begin to produce passives.
Get passives tend to be used to describe something
negative that happened to an animate entity----- a
person or animal (e.g., The boy got punished),
whereas be passives tend to be about inanimate
things (e.g., They [the pieces of paper] have just
been cutten off [personal data]).

Producing complex
sentences

Developmental Changes in childrens

production of simple and complex
sentences

Developmental changes in the types of complex

sentences children produce

Children, Complex sentences, in order

of development
1. Object

complements
Want you to draw that for me.
Make her eat.

2.Coordinate sentences
You will be the prince and I will be the princess.
He was stuck and I got him out.
3. Subordinate clause sentences in which the main clause is first
and the adjunct clause follows.
They go to sleep
I want this doll because shes big.
4.Object relative clause sentences
There is lot of stuf that needs come of.

Individual diferences in
grammatical development

Holistic (top-down)

---For example, a 2-year-old who

stores chunks in memory might be able
to say I dont wanna go nightnight by
combining just two units---- Idontwanna
and gonightnight.

Analytical (bottom-up)

--- In this approach children may break into

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

Measuring grammatical
development

Length in morphemes is a good index of

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

For example, a telegraphic sentence

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

The relation of MLU (mean length of

utterance) to age for Adam, Eve. And Sarah

Stages of grammatical development

and normative age ranges
Stage
MLU
Age Range
Early I
1.01-1.49 16-26 months
Late I
1.50-1.99 18-31
II
2.00-2.49 21-35
III
2.50-2.99 24-41
Early IV 3.00-3.49 28-45
Late IV/Early V 3.50-3.99 31-52
Late V 4.00-4.49 37-52
Post V
4.5+
41-

Questions:

What is meant by the productivity of Language, and

what is its significance for the task of explaining
language acquisition?

What aspects of language structure have children

acquired, and what have they not acquired, when they
produce telegraphic speech?

What is the diference between holistic and an

analytical approach to the acquisition of grammatical
structure? What would be evidence for each in
childrens speech?

Thank you!!!