Linguistic Development Research Paper (Page 21 of 37) in pdf

8 THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD

Semantic Relation

Examples

Agent + Action

mommy come; daddy sit

Action + Object

drive car; eat grape

Agent + Object

mommy sock; baby book

Action+ Location

go park; sit chair

Entity + Location

cup table; toy ﬂoor

Possessor + Possessed

my Teddy; mommy dress

Entity + Attribute

box shiny; crayon big

Demonstrative + Entity

dat money; dis telephone

Table 5: Common categories of meaning (semantic relations) expressed in children’s

earliest sentences

they are learning. The semantic rules which it is born with can be combined in a variety of ways

which can reﬂect the language community in which it is born.

In the prelinguistic stage prior to the development of intelligent speech babies have still developed

a means of communicating with their care-givers. e.g. crying, cooing, laughing, whining and partic-

ularly pointing. Perhaps by pointing at an object the mother is prompted to give a name to that

object. So the use of pointing and other gestures may serve the purpose of increasing the linguistic

input that the child receives.

The babies will also be using other gestures to disambiguate telegraphic sentences. By 2 to 2 ; 6

children have also learnt that there are other keys to eﬀective communication, such as hearing others

properly by placing yourself near them and making yourself heard by speaking up.

The order order of development is fairly predictable and is the same for all languages that share

the same system of noun and verb suﬃxes. Until children have learnt suﬃxes that make word order

ﬂexible they have no way to produce unambiguous word orderings.

Towards age 3 the child is able to determine the subject and object of a sentence without having

to make reference to the word ordering. They are able to do this by examining the relationships

between the verb and the other sentence parts. As is described in other parts of this report the

cognitively simplest grammatical morphemes are learnt ﬁrst. For instance the present tense third

person singular /-s/ as in “he goes”m develops before the past tense endings such as “he goed”.

There are also less variations in the structure of the present tense third person singular forms of

verbs than there are in the past tense forms.

From 1 ; 6 onwards the child is already beginning to produce two word sentences, even though

single word sentences continue to be used for some time. At 1 ; 6 the baby is becoming skilled at

monitoring and comprehending the responses of others, even though they have not really mastered

the grammatical rules of language.

At 1 ; 9 to 2 ; 0 the child is able to adapt their form of communication if they are not able to make

themselves understood (repair). By introducing ﬂexibility to ﬁnd some means of communicating the

child is actively seeking out a rudimentary syntactic/semantic system.

By 2 ; 0 they are regularly producing 3 to 4 word sentences, often ungrammatical by adult standards

but certainly obeying some rules of grammar. The rules are fewer and simpler but that have been

shown to exist. Their understanding of the grammatical rules of language used by adults is expanding

very quickly. They will start to reorder the words in sentences in accordance with syntactic rules for

the conversion of declarative sentences to questions or negations etc. The children will at this stage

start to practice dialogue when they are alone. It seems that they are practicing new words and

grammar forms and playing with sounds and rhymes. They are trying to make sense of the world

Linguistic Development Research Paper Page 21

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