Grammatical Acquisition Flashcards
What are two areas of grammar?
Syntax and morphology
Syntactical advances allow children to:
-Order words into phrases and clauses
-Make different types of utterances ( simple, compound and complex ) fir different functions, except for declarative.
Morphological advances allow children to:
-Add inflections to words creating and marking distinctions between adjectives, showing possession and making plurals (inflectional morphology)
-Experiment with language by adding prefixes and suffixes to make new words, and convert words from one class to another (derivational morphology).
Name the four stages of children’s grammatical development and the approximate age, in months, at which each stage occurs:
- Holophrastic - 12-18
- Two-word - 18-24
- Telegraphic - 24-36
- Post-telegraphic -36+
Who studied two-word sentences and discovered that children from all countries and cultures make the same relationships between grammatical concepts?
Roger Brown
Describe the three stages of negation that Ursula Bellugi identified in young children:
- Uses ‘no’ or ‘not’ at the beginning or end of a sentence e.g ‘No wear shoes’
- Moves ‘no/not’ inside the sentence e.g ‘I no want it’
- Attaches the negative to auxiliary verbs and the copula verb ‘be’ securely e.g ‘No, I don’t want to go to nursery’, ‘I am not’
What are Bellugi’s three stages of pronoun development?
- The child use their own name (for example ‘Tom Play’.
- The child recognises the ‘I/me’ pronouns and that these are used in different places within a sentence (for example,’I play toy’, ‘Me do that’).
- The child uses them according to whether they are in the subject or object position within a sentence (for example, ‘I play with the toy’, ‘Give it to to me’).
______ are another function word acquired later in development
Determiners
What is a free morpheme?
A word that makes sense on its own e.g ‘pre’ or ‘consumer’ in ‘consumerism’
What is a bound morpheme?
A word that only makes sense when it does its grammatical job e.g ‘ism’ in ‘consumerism’ or ‘anti’ in ‘antibiotic’
Give four examples of prefixes
- De
- Pre
- In
- Un
Give four examples of suffixes
- Ion
- Ly
- Able
- Ing
What is the uncontractible copula in this sentence? ‘Gracie is going to bed’?
Is
What is the contractible copula in this sentence? ‘Bobbie, she’s asleep’?
She’s
Who believed that children will only acquire more complex forms of language when their intellectual development can cope? What is the name if this theory?
Piaget, cognitive theory
______________ are the mistakes children make as they develop grammatically
Virtuous errors
What virtuous error was famously proven by Jean Berko Gleason, in the 1950’s?
Overgeneralisations
What is Berko Gleason’s ‘wug test’? What activity did she conduct?
A study into children’s pronunciation and morphological development. In part of the study, she gave children a picture of an imaginary creature called a ‘wug’ and asked them what more than one wug would be called. Three quarters of the 4 and 5-year-olds surveyed formed the regular plural ‘wugs’.
What is the MLU?
Mean Length of Utterance
Explain a what is a stative verb and give 3 examples.
A verb that just is, represents a state, for example ‘to think’, ‘to be’ and ‘to have’.
Explain what is a dynamic verb and give 3 examples.
A verb that represents an action, for example ‘to jump’, ‘to throw’ and ‘to eat’.
Explain what is an auxiliary verb and give 3 examples.
A verb used to make a sentence make sense, for example ‘I am going’, ‘I will go’ and ‘she has money’.
What is a determiner? Give an example.
A word that determines the precision of the thing you’re talking about e.g numbers, ‘the’ etc
Give an example of the past tense irregular.
Run, ran
