MOTHER ROLE

As in other areas of language development, in syntactic development, too, the mo

ther or caretaker has a role to play. In a dialogue with a child, she extends, e
xpands, rephrases, or repeats a child’s utterance as well as her own, by doing s
o, she provides him with valuable speech input and feedback.
Penner 1987 observe two groups, each consisting ten parents and their children
( group one with MLU 2 -2,5 and group two with MLU 3-3.5). The types of th
e parent’s responses differed depending on the grammaticality o9f the children p
roceeding utterance. The parents expanded children and grammatical utterances ca
lled forth expansion from the their mother. Half the time, children imitate the
expansion incorporating some of the linguistic information provided in the expan
sion ( Slobing 1986)
Mother expands a toddler’s utterance by adding the parts usually grammat
ical morpheme, that she judge to have been missed presenting the meaning and the
word order. Mothers as role don’t correct children’s syntactic error. When live
express the opinion that her mother as girl with’ he a girl’, mother approve’ t
hat right.
TWO WORD COMBINATION
Shortly before age two, toddlers begin to put two ( or three) words together on
e utterance, as in ‘no down’ and ‘more car’. how do toddlers arrive at word utt
erances? What do two words utterances means, and what pattern do they follow? Is
there grammar for such utterances?
Positional Patterns
By examining sixteen corpora two words combination, Braine (1976) noted three ki
nds of positional pattern. In a’ groping pattern’ a toddler is groping to expres
s a meaning before she has acquired set of rules for ordering words. Thus, ‘boot
off’ on one occasion and’ off bib’ on another. In a ‘positional – associative p
attern, words position is consistent without being productive. Each words combin
ation
( all broke) is learn individually. In a ‘positional productive’ pattern, a word
s combination pattern is both consistent and productive, that is, appear in seve
ral utterances. The bulk of two words combinations uttered by two years old fall
into positional productive pattern, which can classify broadly according to the
semantic contents and functional categories.
A Grammar of Two Words Utterances.
In the past twenty five years or so, several in innate universal grammar childre
n stage 1 (MLU-1-2) speech has been propose, but in time all have been found wa
nting. The approach these grammar adopt can be normal functional semantic or con
ceptual. Chomsky’s (1965, chap 3 generative transformational grammar be composes
sentences as :
S = NP1 +VP
VP=V +NP2
Does cases grammar (chap 4 fit stage 1 speech? the case categories of actor and
action, cuet partly by the meaning of words, maybe easer to acquire than grammat
ical categories of subject and verb. Any attempt to impose an innate in universa
l formal grammar for stage one speech is likely to prove Procrustean bed. A conc
eptual explanation (not a grammar) would that a toddler can keep only two concep
ts and short relation in main at once.
Development of Grammatical Morpheme and Categories
English sentences typically contains some contents words which main inflect numb
er tense and so forth as well as a few a function words that relate the word.
Sentences of other language contain other kinds of grammatical morpheme such as
post positions or vowel inserts. Children initially don’t use grammatical morph
eme but gradually lean use them over period of years.
 Telegraphic Speech
Toddler produce utterances that lack most if not all grammatical morpheme ( in s
quare brackets). Why do children produce telegraphic speech? Limitation of vocab
ulary not be the cause of telegraphic speech because children at age two know ov
er hundred words, on the one hand, and because the missing words are short frequ
ency morpheme, on the other. Do they produce a full a sentences from which they
then deliberately delete items, as adults do in composing telegram? Hardly young
children produce telegraphic speech because they possess only limited capacity,
which they exhaust in producing key content words.
Learning Grammatical Morpheme
Function words first appear in children speech amorphous place. But they were po
sitioned where the article, preposition and so forth belong. In R Browns (1973)
longitudinal study of three subject, fourteen English grammatical morpheme star
ted to appear at MLU=2, 25 and continue to develop through MLU= 4, 25. And the c
riterion acquisition is a morpheme presence in 90% of all obligatory content fou
r three successive two hour sample. The order in which children acquire the fou
rteen grammatical morphemes was roughly the same prompting Brown to declare the
order is in variants. R Brown (1973) conclude that syntactic and semantic compli
city but not frequency of any sort determine the order. However in Moerk’s reana
lysis of Brown data, items frequently spoken to the children by parents tend eme
rge early in the children speech. In other study if mother frequently ask yes/no
question thereby using auxiliary verb in sentence initial position and sometime
with stress, the children acquired these verb quickly
.Leaning Verb Inflection
Initially toddler include no tense aspect mode and the like when verb inflection
star to emerge they appear indicate aspect (completed versus continues action)r
ather then tense (present, future and past). In four English speaking children (
MLU=1,5 3,0) three verb inflection, -ing, -s, -ed, were use selectively with the
difference population of the verbs such play, hold, ride, write name activities
that can continue occurred almost exclusively with –ing but not with other inf
lection.
English for past tense can be regular (walk-walked), or irregular (go-went- gone
). Children take some time to learn the inflections, through three stages. In st
age 1, Children learn , item by item , by rote, only a few high- frequency , mos
tly irregular verbs( came, got, gave and so on.) . in stage 2, children use larg
er number of past- tense verbs, the majority of which are regular. They have the
rule “ add – ed to a verb for past tense. Thus ,they can produce tenses even fo
r invented words, as in “gling= glinged” ( Berko 1958) . They show a regularizin
g tendency, that is , adding –ed to irregular verbs, even to they used correctly
in stage 1 , as in “ comed” and even ‘ camed” . In stage 3 they use the rule bu
t do not apply it to the exceptions.
According to PDP proponents, learning of English past-tense verbs does necessary
involve formulating an explicit rule, but it may result from existing . !) a co
mputer , without using the past tense rule, was able formulate the three stages
of learning English verb inflections. One part of PDP model is the pattern assoc
iate, which contains a modifiable inflection linking each input pattern to eac
h output ( the past tense generated) .Initially, these connection are set to 0,
the strengths of these connections is what learning is all about. The is has le
aned the characteristic of the pats tense of English. Not only can respond corre
ctly to the 460 verbs that is was taught, but also it is able to realize and tr
ansfer what has been trained. A large amount of learning on the tenses of many r
egular verbs out weights the small amount of leaning on all of irregular verbs.
The success of the PDP simulation partly perhaps critically statistic o
f the input patterns. The onset of overregulation occurred a sudden jump in the
proposition of regular forms in the input from20 until to 80 percent, whereas in
real life, children’s input maintains a fifty into between the two types of ver
b across prince (1988). Nevertheless, the computer simulation demonstrates the
following behavior can occur in the absence of rules.
 Learning Grammatical Morpheme in Difference Language
The system of grammatical morpheme differ enormously among language and art acq
uire at different rate. The inflectional system of some Indo-European language
Irregular and difficult for children (and adult foreigners) to acquire. In Hebre
w, most words have the form of ‘ root + pattern) in which the root is set of con
sonant such as ktv while the pattern contains vowel insert, in katav ‘ (he) wro
te ‘ ( chap 1. Hebrew speaking children first acquire words as unanalyzed wholes
(Berman 1981). Early on, however they perceive set of words as related throug
h a shared root or share pattern, laying the foundation for later ‘ root + patte
rn’ by age three, children use relevant affixes to mark number, gender, person a
nd tense. Polish children also use inflection, much earlier then English speakin
g children because the pattern’ word stem+ inflectional suffix is very frequent.
In sum, grammatical morpheme are most difficult to mastery when they numerous,
semantically empty, syntactically optional and phonetically produce, and occurre
d in frequently and inflect capriciously
Learning grammatical categories and relation
As part of acquiring syntax children to use appropriately such grammatical class
is as noun and verb , such function as subject and object and the cases categori
es as actor and action . The categories and relation can be classified on severa
l basis, such as semantic , morphosintatic, and distributional ( chap 4).
In one formal view grammatical classis may begin as a system based on semantic,
but sun enough become a system based on inflectional also take effort that thir
d person, ing for continuous act, action and so on..
Children will come to treat words with such endings as a verb. Inflectional bas
ed learning is necessary because meaning are not always reliable clues to gramma
tical classis for example, sativa verb (example sleep lack action meaning, on on
e hand, and some adjectives( e.g. naughty). Have action meaning on the other.
Inflectional morphology can not be the major basis for classifying words, consid
ering the many irregularities and complexity of the inflectional system of most
language , languages and considering the enormous Difficulties children face to
mastering them. School instruction in French basis the identification of grammat
ical classis on morphosintactic criteria, school children do mention the criteri
a but they identification on meaning. and they find the text surprisingly diffic
ult.( Bronckart 1997)
In another formal view, correspondence between meaning and ways of expre
ssing them serves only to bootstrap innately specified grammatical categories (e
.g., Pinker 1985) in ‘Basic’ sentences ( sentences structure young children enc
ounter frequently?) , agents and patients tend to a subject and object, respecti
vely. Children these semantic –syntactic correspondences to classify agents in s
entences as subjects, things as nouns and so on. Items that do not obey the sema
ntic –syntactic correspondence (e.g. subjects, of passives, abstract nouns) can
be classified by virtue of their behavior in previously learned phrase struct
ures or inflectional paradigm.
Development of Sentences meaning and Interpersonal function
Syntactic development occurs not only in number of constituents
and clauses but in other aspects , as we shall see in the rest of this sectio
n. The sequence of linguistic items is uniform among these British children, as
it was among the three American in R Brown’s (1973) pioneering studies. In term
of mean length of structured utterance MLSU) counted in morphemes, omitting such
as unstructured utterance as ‘yes’ and ‘ hello’ , there is rapid increase, fro
m 1 to 4.4 up to age 3,6 :wheatear there is only a slight increase up to age 5,0
. Individual children vary in the rate of increase in MLSU: a rapid or slow deve
loper can deviate learn an average child by as much as 1.5 years. The age listed
for each level in tale 10-3 is the median meaning the age at which 50 percent o
f the children are received a given level.
 Syntax is acquired so that meaning relations and interpersonal
functions an be expressed unambiguously. The state or relation in which particip
ants engaged is called sentences-meaning relation. At level 1 , one portmanteau
category then is replaced by variety of differentiated meaning relations(existe
nce, attribution, experience ) and relations (location, succession, benefactive,
equivance ), in which the participants(agent, client, and so on) are engage. At
tribution itself differentiates into active, cognitive, and so on.
Full syntactic realization of these relations (e.g. an interroga
tive sentences for a question) emerge at levels 1V and V. G wells (1985a, 271-72
) reports of relationship between the sequence of emergence and that later freq
uency of occurrence of a structure in the children speech. Sentences structures
acquired early tend to occur frequently in their late speech ; conversely, struc
tures that are late to emerge are slow to enter into the speech of all children
and are afterwards used infrequently. Figure 16 -2 show s the change in relat
ive frequency with age of eleven decelerating ( including negative ) and interro
gative sentence types averaged over all the children in the study.
As the range of available options increases, the relative freque
ncy of any particular item may decrease, causing the downturn in many curves. T
he further upward movement of a curve immediately following emergence may indica
te a period of frequent use that may serve a practice function for the learner.
Since this curve represents a population average, the actual peak in usage is pr
obably sharper for individual children, who tend to play most with a new toy
or concept .after achieving a great height the downturn of a curve appears sharp
.
The pattern of preschoolers’ syntactic development found in English migh
t be found in other languages, too , if large scale study in Israel, Hebrew-spea
king preschoolers 6-6;5)showed age –related syntactic development; with increasi
ng age, the were increased occurrences of clauses with explicit verbs, clauses,
with ended verb phrases ,and multiclause utterance(Dromi & Berman 1986).
What Determines The Sequences and Rate of Acquisition
Relative language complicity is the major determinant of order of emergence in t
he sense that it delimits what the child will be able to learn at each stage. Wi
thin these limits, frequency in the input plays a role in facilitating the actua
l learning: on the one hand, certain minimal frequency is necessary to provide t
he child with a model from which to learn and, the other hand, differences in r
elative frequency make some items more salient than others….(G well 1885a, p . 3
81).
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Bloom, L., Lightbown, P., & Hood, M. (1975) Structure and variation in child lan
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Bloom, P. (in press) Bohannon, J. N., and Stanowicz, L. (1988) The issue of nega
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Bowerman, M. (1982). Evaluating competing linguistic models with language acquis
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Bowerman, M. (1982b) Reorganizational processes in lexical and syntactic develop
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