The reason why there are different meanings to the child’s utterances at this stage is due to the absence of inflectional affixes. These are endings such as ‘-s’ at the end to show possession or as a plural form for nouns or ‘-ed’ at the end to indicate past tense (e.g. walk – walked, bottle- bottles or Joe’s).
Therefore questions also begin to be asked by the rising tone in the child’s voice when speaking (intonation) e.g. ‘Mummy gone?’
Around the age of two a child starts to produce 3-4 utterances. This stage is known as the Telegraphic stage as like in a ‘telegram’ only the crucial words are used children only use the crucial words initially to get the basic meaning across e.g. ‘Teddy’s hat come off.’ Here the auxiliary verb ‘has’ is not used, as the child has not yet learnt it yet the grammatical sequence is correct.
Though the sentences produced by the child tend to be simple sentences they are in correct grammar sequence like:
‘I want that’ Subject + Verb + Object
Some grammatical elements like prepositions (in, at), auxiliary verbs (to be, to have) and determiners (the, a) are omitted initially. Sentences like commands (‘me want that’), statements (‘teddy look tired’) and questions (‘Where Mummy gone?’) begin to be formed. The question words or ‘wh’ words like ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘why’, ‘who’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ are begun to be used though auxiliary verb not grasped.
e.g. ADULT: ‘ Where has Mummy gone?’
CHILD: ‘Where Mummy gone?’
The child also starts to learn the negative expressions like ‘no’ and ‘not’ which maybe used as a single expression or in front of another expression e.g. ‘no want’ or just ‘no’.
By the age of three elements that were previously omitted like determiners, prepositions and auxiliary verbs tend to be used more often.
e.g. ‘I am going to see Harriet.’
More than one clause is used as well as the use of coordinating conjunctions (and, but) e.g. ‘want to go to bed’ or ‘Joe go and I go’.
Inflectional affixes are gradually acquired from about 18 months. Research has found a predictable pattern in acquiring inflexional affixes, determiners and auxiliary verbs. A researcher called Brown studied the language development in children between the ages of 20 and 36 months. He found that there is a regular sequence in the way inflections are acquired as shown below:
- ‘–ing’
- plural ‘–s’
- possessive ‘–‘s’
- determiner ‘the’, ‘a’
- past tense ‘–ed’
-
3rd person singular verb ending ‘–s’
- auxiliary verb ‘to be ‘
Another researcher Cruttenden (1979) divided inflection acquisition into 3 stages:
- Initially the child memorizes the words when imitating an adult but doesn’t know the general rules of grammar. So a child may use the correct plural form of a noun like feet (foot) or correct past tense form ran (run).
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At the second stage the child tends to show awareness of grammatical rules of inflections and so may apply the regular inflexional endings to the irregular inflexional endings e.g. learns to use plural –s for nouns so foots not feet used or that past tense usually had –ed at end so runned not ran is used. This is known as overgeneralization. Though this may seem as an error it is not really considered as one instead it is considered as the progress a child has made in applying the rules they have learnt. e.g. “He satted on the truck”
- Finally the correct inflections are used including irregular verb forms.
Learning the regular past tense form (-ed) is easier than irregular past tense forms as the regular forms tend to have a relationship with the root of the word or have the same word as the past tense. Whereas the irregular past tense forms are harder to learn as the may not have any relationship to the original verb.
e.g. regular verb ‘to push’ ‘to see’
I pushed I saw
you pushed you saw
irregular verb ‘to be’
I am
You are
The earliest –ed words used are those which describe a completed action that is easily perceived by the child rather than a continuous activity with no clear end e.g., opened is easier than talked.
Questions have auxiliary verbs and can be formed by reversing the subject-verb order e.g. “Is Joe here?” Though using the ‘wh’ words, some questions are incorrectly inverted e.g. “Why Joe isn’t here?” as this takes time to acquire.
Other negative forms like ‘don’t’ and ‘can’t’ begin to be used. These words and ‘no’ and ‘not’ begin to be placed after the subject but before the verb in sentences e.g. “I don’t want it”. This is more difficult than adding affixes as the negatives have to be put between two words in the right place. Later more negative forms like ‘isn’t’ and ‘didn’t’ are used and negative constructions are generally more accurate.
Overall researchers have attempted to discover whether grammatical rules are just learnt or simply imitated. In an experiment carried out by Berko, he showed pictures of fictional creatures he called ‘Wugs’. At first they were shown a picture of one of these creatures and told the ‘This is a wug’. Next he then showed a picture of another creature and told then ‘Now there’s another one, there are two of them.’ The children are then asked to complete the sentence ‘There are two…’ The 3-4 year olds said ‘wugs’. As the word has not been heard before they are clearly applying the plural –s rule.
Children between two and a half and five often show awareness of grammar rules though it’s not totally correct, they tend to over generalise to make the language more consistent than it is and so end up forming and using words like ‘wented’, ‘mouses’ and ‘sheeps.’ As the child grows older more grammatical principles tend to be learnt and correctly used though language acquisition varies in each child.
