Development of grammar

Development of grammar

1. 12-18 months

   • utterances which are just one long word
   • gone, dada, teddy, hi
   • often called the holophrastic stage
     • children put the equivalent of a whole sentence into one word

2. 18 months-2 years

   • 2 words are put together to make primitive sentence structures
   • 'cat jump' seems to express a subject and verb contrusction
   • 'shut door' seems to express a verb and object construction
   • by the end of this stage children have learned serveral basic lessons about English word order

3. 2-3 years

   • 'filling out' these simple sentence patterns
   • adding extra elements of clause structure and making elements more complex
   • 3 element 'daddy got car' and 4 element 'you go bed now' shows progress

4. 3 years

   • sentences become much longer
   • children start stringing their clauses together to express more complex thoughts and to tell simple stories
   • this stage takes 6 months or so for basic patterns of clause sequence to be established

5. 3 1/2-4 1/2

   • a child aged 3 1/2 might say "him give the cheese to the mouses"
     • by 4 1/2 most children would say "he gave the cheese to the mice"
   • they have learnt the adult forms of the irregular noun and verb of the pronoun
   • takes almost a year for them to sort out grammatical irregularities

6. after 4 1/2

   • features still being learned - sentence connecting features, complex patterns of subordination
   • eventually acquiring control over grammar of written language in early teens

7. Speech production

   • 6-8 weeks
     • cooing
   • 3-4 months
     • vocal play
   • 6 months
     • babbling
   • 9 months
     • strings of syllables pronounced