GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT

THE GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT-

Sometime between 1 and a half year and 2 and a half years , as productive vocabulary approaches 200 words ,children combine two words , such as “mommy shoe” , “ go car”  and “more cookie”. These two word utterences are called telegraphic speech because like telegram,they focus on high content words and leave out smaller , less important ones. Children the word over use two-word utterances to express a wide variety of meanings.According to one view, a more complete , and perhaps adult like , grammar lies behind these two word sentences(Glietman et al. ,1988;Pinker,1994; Valian,1991 )Consistent with the idea,children often use the same construction to express different propositions.For example, a child might say,”mommy cookie” when he sees his mother eating a cookie and also when he wants his mother to give him a cookie.Perhaps the more elaborate structures are present in the child’s mind,but he cannot yet produce the longer word string.In thr third year,three word sentences appear in English speaking children follow a subject-verb-object word order.Children learning other languages adopt the word orders of the adult speech to which they are exposed.Between ages 2 and a half and 3 ,children create sentences in which adjective,articles,nouns and verbs and prepositional phrases start to conform to an adult structure,indicating that they have begun to master the grammatical categories of their language.Between ages 3 and a half and 6, children produce more complex constructions and their usage increasingly conforms to the rules of their language.First,connectives appear that join whole sentences and verb phrases (“I got up and ate breakfast”).The most general connective and is used first, followed by connectives expressing more specific meanings,such as then and when for temporal relations,because and so far causal relations,if for conditionals and but for opposition(Bloom et al.,1980). During the school years,children’s mastery of complex constructions improves. The passive voice is an example.At all ages,children produce more abbreviated passive statements than full passives.During middle childhood and early adolescence,children use the passive voice-including full passive statements-more often.Another grammatical achievement of middle childhood is advanced understanding of infinitive phrases,such as the difference between “john is eager to please” and “john is easy to please”(Ghomsky,1969).Like gains in vocabulary ,appreciation of these subtle grammatical distinctions is supported by children’s improved capacity o analyze and reflect on language and to attend to multiple linguistic and situational cues.