Linguistic Development Research Paper Page 20
ADVERTISEMENT
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
378 THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD
20
This critical mass is very important and gives us an insight into the reason for such simplistic
grammatical formulations in motherese. If a child has reached the end of the 50 word stage, but
does not yet know anything about syntax then they can have an easier job of comprehending a
two word sentence than a three word one. There are two possibilities to the meaning of a two
word sentence, and thus it is easier to decode. For a three word sentence, there are six alternative
meanings. With a four word sentence, there are 24 alternatives, and 120 for a five word sentence.
By concentrative the efforts on a Subject/Object model of language the scaffolding can be put in
place for further development.
A child is able to understand very simple instructions and questions, during this period. Examples
are “DON’T do that!” or “STOP that!”.
From 1 ; 6 to 1 ; 9 a child’s vocabulary will expand from around 20 words to 200 words. These words
will include action names, state names and the odd functional word which refer to kinds of events.
Most of the vocabulary at this stage will consist of naming words (nouns) particularly of objects in
the child’s environment that it can manipulate, such as toys clothes, food or people.
8
The Telegraphic Period
The telegraphic period is so called because of its terseness and lack of function words such as
tense endings, verb endings, prepositions, conjunctions and articles. It occurs between the ages of
1 ; 6 to 3 ; 0 and is thought of as the period during which function words are added to the multi-
word sentences. Consequently it is the most thoroughly studied of all of the periods of linguistic
development.
The essence of telegraphic speech is economy. The words that are used are the absolute minimum
required to convey the meaning. The kind of words that are likely to be omitted are article, prepo-
sitions, pronouns and auxiliary verbs. Young children tend to follow the same strategy, even in their
imitations of adult speech. It was thus thought, initially, that the reason for such economy were
limitations in memory capacity. this view was rejected once researchers noticed that children were
capable of producing 3,4 or even 5 word telegraphic sentences.
Presumably a child that can only generate short sentences will choose to omit those that do not
contribute so much towards the content of the utterance. They therefore allow more effective com-
munication through the omission of redundant(ish) verbiage.
Surprisingly children from very different culture produce similarly structured sentences even though
they have been exposed to strikingly different language structures during their first few years. Tele-
graphic speech thus represents a universal child language.
To analyze child language just on syntax would not convey the meaning the child learned to express
in the holophrastic stage using intonation, stress and pitch etc.
Brown (1973) analyzed the telegraphic speech of children of several countries and produced a seman-
tic grammar (see table 5 below). A semantic grammar is an analysis of the semantic relationships
(meanings) expressed in the earliest sentences. the most common of these relationships are shown
below. (c.f. p.p. 373 [Sha93]
It is presumed that given the rules described in table 5 the next task in the developmental cycle
is to combine them into longer telegraphic utterances. For example, an agent/action relationship
such as “mommy drink” can be added to an agent/object relation such as “drink milk” to yield an
agent/action/object rule for “mommy drink milk”.
if such a milestone is passed then we could concluded that the child is ready to acquire the rules of
syntax. The child would be ready to produce the grammar that more closely resembles the language
ADVERTISEMENT
0 votes
Related Articles
Related forms
Related Categories
Parent category: Education