CLA Grammar Flashcards
Roger Brown
Roger Brown’s study found that children from all language backgrounds make the
! same grammatical relationships between concepts: !
Telegraphic stage: 2-5 years!
Children continue to omit nonessential grammatical terms, namely determiners,
inflexions and pronouns!
• A child will often repeat standard adult utterances telegraphically, disproving
behaviourism !
• By the age of 5, most grammatical rules have been learnt!
• However, the passive voice is yet to be mastered
Post-telegraphic 5+
A child is now relatively competent grammatically!
• However, they still struggle with:! a) Interrogatives!
• The child must learn:!
- Auxiliary insertion, e.g. do you like singing?!
- Conjugation of main verb to infinitive, e.g. do you like to sing?!
- Use of interrogative pronouns, e.g. what do you like to sing?!
- Inversion of pronoun/auxiliary, e.g. can you sing?!
During the two word stage, the child will:!
Express questions through intonation!
- Omit pronouns and copula verbs !
- Use interrogative pronouns in isolation!
Telegraphic
Begin using pronouns and possessives!
- Conjugate verbs incorrectly !
- Struggle to invert the auxiliary !
- Omit the ‘do’ auxiliary !
- Begin adding negation, namely negative modals in closed questions !
Post-telegraphic 2
Begin to use auxiliaries but continue to conjugate them incorrectly !
Begin mastering inversion, but still struggle, especially when used with interrogative
pronouns!
Struggle to conjugate the main verb into the infinitive form
Negation. Ursula Bellugi (1967) suggested three stages for child negation development:
1)2.0, MLU 2-3!
Add negatory particle ‘no’ to beginning of affirmative sentences!
2)2.3, MLU 3-4!
Use contracted negation of ‘can’t’ and ‘don’t’, likely because these have been learnt as
units!
Place the negatory particle in the correct position! Omit auxiliary and 3)verb tense!
2.9, MLU 4+!
Struggle to change the verb tense into the infinitive form in the presence of an auxiliary! Limited ability to use and conjugate ‘do’!
May use double-negatives!
Use ‘not’ instead of ‘no’
Pronouns
The child’s likely to learn first person pronouns first, because they’re egocentric (Piaget) ! They may use demonstratives to refer to objects in their immediate environment !
The second person pronoun is generally the last to be acquired
Ursula Bellugi categorised three stages of pronoun development:!
- Not using pronouns; nouns or names instead!
- Use of subject pronouns at the initial position, and object pronouns in the medial and final positions! (Child recognizes there is difference between subject and object pronouns but may not be able to apply it.)
- Understanding the difference between the function and position of each different pronoun !
Complex sentences
In order to produce them correctly, a child must have a sophisticated grasp of ! subordinating conjunctions, prepositions, determiners and pronouns
Morphology
Inflectional morphology is the occurrence of affixes which serve a purely grammatical purpose !
• Children tend to omit them in the early stages of language acquisition!
The order in which children generally acquire
inflections (Brown, 1973)
Present progressive affix -ing; Plural -s; Possessive -s; Articles the, a; Regular past tense -ed; Third person singular -s; Auxiliary be
Jean Berko-Gleason
Wug Test (1958)
