Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 333
years old, and she showed that five- and six-year-old children were able to add the
appropriate grammatical suffixes to invented words when the words’ grammatical class
was clear from the context. Her experimental procedure has become known as the wug
procedure, wug being one of the invented words used in the experiment.
This experiment and others like it may be used to argue for the hypothesis that
children are ‘tuned in’, not only to the sounds of human language (see above) but also to
its syntax, in the sense that they display ‘a strong tendency…to analyse the formal
aspects of the linguistic input’ (Karmiloff-Smith, 1987, p. 369). Karmiloff-Smith (1979)
shows that French children determine gender by attending to word endings from about
the age of three, and Levy (1983) produces similar findings for Hebrew-speaking
children. Karmiloff-Smith (1987, p. 370) argues that, since a child will get its message
through without all the correct syntactic markers attached to it, the child must be showing
analytical interest in adding them when it does so.
The order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in English tends to be that -ing
appears first, then the regular plural -s, then possessive -s and irregular past-tense forms,
before the regular forms (Yule, 1985, pp. 143–4) (see the discussion of the generalization
principle above). Yule (1985, pp. 144–5) isolates three stages for the acquisition of the
most studied syntactic categories: question and negative formations. Stage I occurs
between 18 and 26 months; stage II between 22 and 30 months; and stage III between 24
and 40 months. During stage I, children either simply begin any question with a wh- form
such as where or who, or they use rising intonation. To form negatives, children at this
stage simply begin the utterance with no or not. During stage II of question formation,
intonation is still used, but more wh- forms become available. For negative formation,
don’t and can’t begin to appear, and both these forms and no and not are placed in front
of the verb instead of at the beginning of the utterance. In stage III, questions have the
required inversion of subject and verb, although wh- forms do not always undergo the
inversion: Can I have a piece versus Why kitty can’t stand up? Didn’t and won’t appear
for negatives during stage III, with isn’t appearing very late (see Ingram, 1989, Ch. 9, for
a far more detailed account, including reports of several studies of Subject-Aux
Inversion).
Ingram (1989) discusses a number of proposed explanations for this acquisition
pattern. According to performance-factor approaches, children have the adult rules
available to them from the start, but are prevented by performance factors, such as
limitations of memory, from applying them. According to competence-factor
approaches, the child’s speech reflects its grammar at the time, and the adult rules are
acquired gradually, restricted at first to specific contexts and then increasingly
generalized. Thus Kuczaj and Brannick (1979) propose that the child first learns to invert
subject and verb for certain specific wh- words, and then gradually learns to do it for all
wh- words.
Other areas of syntax which have received much attention include passives, relative
clauses, and the use of pronouns to refer to noun phrases in the surrounding text.
Horgan (1978) shows that whereas children aged between two and four years
recognize the passive form, they tend to misunderstand the relationship between the
participants described by reversible passives such as The cat was chased by the girl;
children tend to use this form to describe a picture of a cat chasing a girl. Horgan’s and
other studies suggest that it takes several years for children to acquire full understanding