The Acquisition Of Morphology and Syntax
It is not until about the age of 12
months that a child will begin to consistently produce words of the language it is learning. it is at this
stage that we can begin to examine the development of syntax and morphology in
children’s speech.
1.
The
One – Word Stage
The
first words uttered by one-year-old child typically name people, objects, pets
and other familiar and important parts of this environment. The child’s
vocabulary soon comes to include verbs and other useful words as nouns
including no, gimme, and mine). Often a phrase used by adults
will become a single word in the speech of a child, such as allgone and whasat?
The single words produced at this stage are used as more than just labels for
objects or events, they may be used for naming, commenting, requesting,
inquiring, and so on. In fact, this level of development has been called the holophrasticb
stage – a holophrase being a one – word sentence. Children at this stage are
limited to a word at a time in their production, but they understand and
probably intend the meaning of more than
a single word. Certainly children can understand the utterances of other
people even when they consist of much
more than one word. The intonation children use on their one – word utterances
may be that of question, and ordinary or emphatic statement, or an imperative.
If children do consistently use these adult – like intonation patterns (and
researchers disagree about whether they do or not), it would seem even more likely
that “holophrastic” is an appropriate name for this stage.
2.
The Two – Word Stage
Between
approximately 18 and 24 months of age, children begin to use two – word
utterances. At first they may seem to be simply two one – word sentences
produced one right after the other. There may be a pause between them, and each
word may be a separate intonation contour. Before long, however, the two
words are produced without pausing and
with a single intonational pattern.
Children
at this stage do not just produce any two words in any order; rather, they
adopt a consistent set of word orders which convey an important part of the
meaning of their utterances. At this
of level of development, the structure
of utterances is determined by semantic
relationships, rather than adults syntactic ones. Only word order is used to
express these semantic relations; only later are additional syntactic devices
added to the basic word order rules.
Most of the utterances produced by a child at this stage will express a
semantic relations like one of the following:
agent
+ action baby
sleep
action
+ object kick
ball
action
+ locative sit
chair
entity
+ locative teddy
bed
possessor
+ possession mommy book
entity
+ attribute block
red
demonstrative
+ entity this
shoe
words
such as more and ‘nother may be used as modifiers of nounds (more
juice, ‘nother cup) to indicate or request recurrence. Here and there
may be used as demonstrative or locatives. Some children of this stage of
development also use pronouns. For the most part, however, their speech lacks function
morphemes and words. These function morphemes include prepositions, auxiliary,
verbs, articles, and inflectional affixes.
These little function morphemes are
omitted during this stage and even after the child begins to produce more than
two words at a time. Because of this omission, this speech of young children is
often called telegraphic. When you send a telegram or run a classified
ad, every word you include costs you money. Therefore, you only put in the words you really need, and not the ones that carry
no new information. Children follow the same principle of economy. The words
they use and the order in which they use them convey the relevant information;
function morphemes would be redundant. Of course, pronouns, more, ‘nother,
and the other word mentioned earlier carry independent meanings and can
fill one of the positions in the semantic relations listed above. Eventually,
of course, children do acquire the full set of function morphemes of their
language – the “syntactic devices” mentioned above that supplement the
expression of semantic relations through
word order rules.