Linguistic Development Research Paper (Page 22 of 37) in pdf

9 THE COMPLEX PERIOD

by ordering events in a systematic way.

R. Brown in 1970 distinguished two types of semantic relationship used in telegraphic speech.:

1. Those expressed by combining a single constant term or pivot word (e.g. “more”, “all gone”)

with another word which refers to an object, action or attribute.

2. Those which do not involve the use of pivot words.

The acquisition of telegraphic speech was thus attributed to the acquisition of two kinds of combi-

natorial rule, namely pivotal or categorical rules. Children vary widely in the amount that they use

the two types of rules.

It has been argued that the use of rules in language must reﬂect some underlying understanding.

Children form schemas to understand the world and then talk about them. Thus the child must form

the idea of object permanence before it can begin to use words for naming purposes. If the child has

not made such connections then the ﬁrst strings of words are likely to be random collections of words.

Such a view of language development is consistence with Piaget’s view of cognitive development.

The Complex Period

During the early complex period the ﬁrst example of grammatical markers appear. It should be noted

that diﬀerent commentators use diﬀerent schemes of development, and some regard the development

of grammatical markers as one of the features of the telegraphic period. See [Mos0s] and [BS84].

Between the ages of 2 ; 6 and 5 the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) increases dramatically. Sen-

tences become considerably more sophisticated. Brown (1973) kept records of three children and

noted their progress in the acquisition of 14 semantic markers that frequently occur in English sen-

tences. he found much variation in the age at which they learnt to use the markers and in the time

that it took them to learn all 14.

He also found that in all of the subjects studied the morphemes were learnt in precisely the same

order. See table 6 below.

These ﬁndings were conﬁrmed by de Villiers and de Villiers (1973) of an additional 21 children. In

order to ﬁnd an explanation Brown rejected the idea that this ordering represented a frequency of

occurrence of a certain type of morpheme. rather, he found that the morphemes learnt ﬁrst required

less cognitive sophistication. The morphemes occur in language with roughly equal frequency.

For example the ﬁrst morpheme to arrive is the /-ing/ present progressive form. this describes

ongoing action which appears before the past regular /-ed / that describes action and a sense of an

earlier time. /-ed / conveys two semantic features and is thus acquired earlier then the uncontractible

forms of the verb to be such asis, are,was, were. these specify 3 semantic relationships: number (was

v. were), tense (is v. was) and action.

It also seems that children in the post-telegraphic phase employ processing strategies that are de-

signed to maximize their chances of ﬁnding the new grammatical morphemes. They will pay more

attention to the ending of words. Thus they ﬁnd suﬃxes easier to learn than preﬁxes. they will also

tend to look for regularities in the language that they hear, and avoid or discount any exceptions

to the rules that they discover. Even if it seems that they have learnt the exception already. Hence

the characteristic U-turn in the child’s performance.

There are in addition to grammatical morphemes, certain of the transformational rules that children

use to convert declarative statements into questions. In English, people learn to transform declara-

tives into wh-questions by placing a wh-word such as who, what, when, where, why and how at the

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