Linguistic Development Research Paper (Page 5 of 37) in pdf

2 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

statements of possession, requests for more of something or statements with relations of the form

(Agent/Action/Object). Sometime after the “telegraphic” stage children will begin to use tense

markers, number, possession and the progressive aspect of verb “-ing”. They are thus starting to

use the appropriate grammatical forms.

In the early part of the telegraphic stage the child might say “baby eat cookie”. The utterances

when they have passed into the early complex stage might be more like “baby eating cookies”.

This marking system will continue to develop for some time to come. The order in which such

grammatical markers are acquired is very orderly. For instance by age 3 most children will start to

produce a variety of sentence types that follow identiﬁable rules.

The child, in producing wh-questions, might simply append the question word onto the beginning of

the sentence as in “what you buy”, leaving the rest unchanged. Later on the auxiliary forms begin to

emerge so that the utterance might be “what did you buyed?” but before long the child progresses

to the ﬁnal adult form “what did you buy?”

In examples such as that shown above the past tense marker is placed on the auxiliary only. So the

long process of learning grammatical rules is one of learning the general rule and then learning the

exceptions to that rule. Chomsky said in 1978 :

Language seems to me to grow in the mind, rather in the way familiar physical systems of the body

grow. We begin our interchange with the world with our minds in a certain genetically determined

state, and through interaction with an environment, with experience, this state changes until it reaches

a fairly steady mature state, in which we possess what we call knowledge of language. The structure

of the mind, in this mature state (and indeed in intermediate states as well), incorporates a complex

system of mental representations and principles of computation on those mental representations.

This sequence of changes from the genetically determined initial state to the ﬁnal steady state seems to

me in many respects analogous to the growth of our organs. In fact I think it is not inappropriate to

regard the mind as a system of mental organs – the language facility being one. Each of which has a

structure determined by our genetic endowment. These organs grow as a result of the triggering eﬀect

of experience, which shapes and articulates them as they develop in the individual through the relevant

period of his life.

[Cho78]

On all of the levels of description that we have for the language process, it has been argued that

development follows a single process. That process is one of generalization, diﬀerentiation, catego-

rization and hierarchical organization. It is often enlightening to examine the typical errors that

children make in the early stages of using a grammatical rule. For instance

(I saw him sweeping)

In this error the past tense rule (suﬃx /-ed / has been applied to an irregular verb, even though the

child has never heard anyone use the word like that. In that case the child has over-generalized the

use of the past tense marker.

During development children will initially use the correct form of the past tense marker for irregular

verbs. When the general rule of past tense formation has been learnt, they will use irregular verbs

wrongly. Such behavior indicates a rejection of previously learnt forms (listemes) in favour of more

general morphological rules. This is very common, even when the result is inappropriate or gives a

meaning that was not intended.

Another example from the sentence is the word “brooming” which is an overextension of the pro-

gressive formation rule (suﬃx /-ing/ as in hammer

hammering or comb

combing) where the

base of the progressive formation is not a verb as in sweep

sweeping but a noun which has been

characterized by its use. The error made is very similar in form and cause to that made with the

verb “seed” in the sentence.

Linguistic Development Research Paper Page 5

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