SYNTACTIC DEVELOPMENT

The gradual approximation of a young child’s syntactic competence to that of the adult language user.

The rate at which syntax is acquired by infants varies greatly. But research has attempted to trace important similarities in the order in which structures are acquired. The problem is to determine precisely when a concept can be regarded as ‘acquired’. Many children go through phases of U-shaped development, in which a form that has apparently been acquired (e.g. went) is rejected in favour of one that conforms to a rule (goed). This appears to be the result of an over-generalisation of a newly acquired rule. Similarly, it cannot be concluded from the first appearance of a particular form that the child has internalised the rule associated with it. Inflected words may be acquired as single units (walked, toys) well before the child extrapolates a generalisable rule from them (‘add-ed’, ‘add-s’).

Because of problems such as these, research into syntactic development is often longitudinal. The child’s progress is assessed in relation to the length of its utterances. A measure known as the mean length of utterance (MLU) indicates the average number of morphemes in its productions at a given point. and is a more reliable indicator of progress than age.

Syntactic development can be monitored once the child begins to use two or more words together. Early multi-word productions have been described as telegraphic speech because they mainly contain content words, with few functors or inflections. These utterances were once believed to be constructed by means of a pivot grammar in which a fixed item had a second item attached to it; but the pattern proved not to be universal. Researchers went on to seek a richer interpretation, which took account of the meanings the child wished to express as well as the forms it used. It was suggested that three language functions were performed in the earliest stages of speech: nomination (naming), often marked by the combination of nouns and deictic terms, recurrence (coded by words such as MORE and ANOTHER), and non-existence (ALLGONE, NO). Several formal patterns were identified, including modifier þ head (BIG DOGGIE), negative þ X (NO BED), location (BOOK TABLE) and agency (DADDY HIT). Most of them served multiple functions: thus, NO þ X was used for refusal, absence and denial.

 Beyond the two- and three-word stages, observational evidence can be analysed by comparing the child’s grammatical system to the adult norm. The absence of certain types of error is sometimes cited as evidence for an innate universal grammar which supports the acquisition process.

Word class. Errors (e.g. attaching verb inflections to nouns) have proved to be very rare. Some commentators suggest that infants operate with innate adult categories of Noun and Verb. Others argue that infants are capable of mapping lexical items on to reality; they can distinguish quite early between objects (= nouns) and states/changes of state (= verbs).

Word order. Children sometimes use a word order that is unusual in the language being acquired; but never an order that is impossible. They appear to recognise the importance of order very early if the language they are acquiring is heavily dependent upon it. Some commentators assert that children have an innate concept of subject and object. Others argue that children map sentence patterns on to reality. Thus, when an adult describes a picture or event using the form X + verb + Y (The rabbit is feeding the duck), the child comes to recognise which sentence slots are occupied by agent and by patient.

Inflection. It is generally assumed that the infant is more aware of word order than inflection. However, children acquiring highly inflected languages (Russian, Hungarian, Greenlandic Eskimo, Turkish, German) show great sensitivity to inflections at quite an early age, and may employ a range of them by the age of two. These finding challenges universalist notions, suggesting that infants respond to the specific features of the target language.

A second approach has been to track the development of a syntactic feature to see if children pass through similar phases in the forms they employ. The English negative and interrogative have been investigated in this way, and four stages of development have been identified.

A more semantically based approach asks how children conceptualise the forms they use. Early past tense forms (emerging at MLU 2.0–2.5) tend to be used mainly or entirely for completed events rather than states. The past tense is found with telic verbs (verbs which have a goal) but not with atelic ones. This, coupled with the evidence that-ing is used preferentially with durative verbs, suggests that infants distinguish situation types at a surprisingly early age.

The findings described so far have been mainly observational. It is also possible to research syntactic development by setting tasks which establish the extent of a child’s syntactic knowledge. One technique has been to get young children to modify a non-word. For example, a child might be shown a picture of an animal described as a WUG, then invited to comment on a picture showing two of them. Infants as young as one year five months have shown themselves capable of distinguishing between That’s Dax and That’s a dax.

Comprehension tasks have been used with older children to check their understanding of more complex syntactic structures. It has been established, for example, that four year olds sometimes have difficulties in understanding reversible passives (The boy was hit by the girl), which they interpret in terms of the standard SVO order of English.

Several theories attempt to account for the way in which syntactic development follows similar patterns across infants. One nativist account (Radford, 1990) suggests that the Universal Grammar with which the child is born is a reduced version of the adult system. The system it is working with lacks certain branches of the tree structure of adult grammar which are acquired as the child matures. Hence the lack of function words and verbal inflections in the child’s early speech. This enables the child to focus on acquiring lexically focused information.

 Evidence of consistent patterns in syntactic development does not only support a nativist interpretation. It could equally reflect the different levels of cognitive difficulty involved in acquiring syntactic concepts. There might be an interplay of two factors: the relative complexity of the various language points and the current stage of development of the child’s own cognitive capacities.

 An alternative empiricist account is provided by connectionist computer programs which have accurately modelled exactly the kind of U-shaped development that a child goes through in acquiring past tense forms.

See also: Cognitivism, Empiricism, Nativism, Social-interactionism

Further reading: Clark (2003); Crain and Lillo-Martin (1999: Part 1); Foster (1990); Foster-Cohen (1999); O’Grady (1997); Owens (2001); Tomasello and Bates (2001: Part III)

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The encyclopaedic view of meaning

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Semantic structure

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Image schemas