Syntactic Development

1. Syntactic Development ECSE 500 Class session 6

2. Review • Phonology • Semantics • Morphology • Today - syntax

3. Syntax • In Linguistics, syntax is the term for the study of rules governing the combination of words to form sentences

4. Syntactic Knowledge • In English the basic order for a simple sentence is: • Noun – verb – object • What if - The kicked boy ball the? • How do we give these words meaning?

5. Syntactic Development • rules that enable us to combine morphemes into sentences. • More crackers • increasingly complex as the child develops. • from two morphemes, to combining words with suffixes or inflections (-s or -ing, as in papers and eating) to questions, statements, commands, etc.

6. Syntactic Knowledge • The knowledge of how words can be combined in meaningful sentences, phrases, or utterances. • Mean length of utterance • Complexity of sentences • Negation • Interrogatives • Passive voice • Pronouns

7. Mean Length of utterance • Language development follows a sequential order • As age increases so does the length of a child’s utterance • 20-30 months of age utterances are typically two words long • 28-42 months they are up to four words long, and so on • the typical length of a child’s utterances what would be expected for their age.

8. Calculating MLU-M • Morphemes vs words • Calculating MLU-M • 1. Record a Language sample from the child • 2. count the number of morphemes – • 3. count the number of utterances – • 4. Divide the number of morphemes by the number of utterances

9. MLU-M • Example • ‘go home now • I live in Billingham • mummy kissed my daddy • I like your dogs’ • Morphemes = 17 • Utterances = 4 • MLU-M = 17/4 = 4.25 • This child’s MLU-M is 4.25 or what would be expected of someone between 42 and 48 months of age

10. Negation • Progression of use of negation: • Stage 1: • No want some food • No the sun is shining • Wear mitten no • Stage 2: • He no bite you. • I no want envelope. • I can’t see you. • That no fish school. • Stage 3: • I don’t want no food.I didn’t did it.No, it isn’t.

11. Intonation and Interrogatives • Stage 1: • I ride train?Who that?Where milk go? • Stage 2: • Does the kitty stand up? (Y/N) • Did Mommy pinch her finger? (Y/N) • Why kitty can’t stand up? • What you are smiling? • Stage 3: • What did you doed?What does coffee taste like?

12. Effects of disabilities • Problematic syntactic structures include relationships between words in sentences and phrases. • Understanding who a pronoun applies to and what function is served by a direct object and an indirect object are examples of this syntactic skill. • oral language production did not automatically improve with age for students with learning disabilities as it does for other students (Wiig et al., 1977).

13. Brown's Stage I • 15 to 30 months • children are expected to have MLUm's (mean length of utterance measured in morphemes) of about 1.75 morphemes.

14. Brown's Stage ii • 28 and 36 months of age, • MLUms between 2.0 and 2.5, • They begin using – • -ing verb • using prepositions • -s plurals ("my cars")

15. Brown’s Stage iii • 36 to 42 months of age • MLUms between 2.5 and 3.0 • They begin using • irregular past tense ("me fell down") • 's possessive as in "Dada's book”They • copulas (words that link a subject and predicate - "I am tall").

16. Brown’s Stage iv • 40 to46 months of age • MLUmsbetween 3.0 and 3.7 • It's at this stage they begin to use • articles • regular past tense • third person regular tense and present tense.

17. Brown’s stage 5 • 42 t0 52 months of age • MLUms between 3.7 and 4.5 • they begin using – • third person irregular • uncontractible auxiliaries • contractible copulas

18. A child with morphology and syntax deficits may: • Demonstrate inconsistent or incorrect word order when speaking • Use a limited number of grammatical markers (e.g. –ing, a, the, possessive ‘s, be verbs) • Have difficulty understanding and using past, present and future verb tenses • Show limited understanding and use of plural forms • Struggle with story retell tasks

19. Syntactic Development By age twenty-four months: • Consistent word order is in place • Expressive language contains few grammatical markers and speech is “telegraphic” By age thirty months: • -ing and plural /s/ begin emerging • Use of negatives between subject and verb (e.g. Mommy no go) appears • Rising intonation is used to indicate a question • Paul, R (2001)

20. Syntax Development By age thirty-six months: • Overgeneralization of past-tense verb forms is in place (e.g. runned) • Use of negatives between subject and verb (e.g. Mommy no go) appears • Rising intonation is used to indicate a question • Present tense auxiliaries have emerged (e.g. Daddy is eating; Bunny does hop) By age forty-two months: • Auxiliary verbs are being ordered correctly in questions and negatives (e.g. What is he doing? versus What he is doing?) • Grammatical markers have emerged including: possessive ‘s, articles a, the, and irregular past tense • Paul, R (2001)

21. Syntax Development By age forty-eight months: • A variety of early complex sentence types emerge including compound sentences (e.g. My shirt is blue and green), full prepositional clauses in sentences (e.g. I put away the toys in the toy box), and simple infinitives (I want to draw). By age forty-eight to sixty months: • Later developing morphemes are acquired, including Be verbs, regular past, and third person /s/  By age five to seven years old: • Passive sentences are understood and used • Paul, R (2001)

22. Syntax Development • For more information on the development of morphology and syntax, please visit,Speech Language Therapy. • References • Paul, R (2001). Language Disorders from Infancy through Adolescence: Assessment and Intervention 2nd Edition. St. Louis, Missouri: Mosby, Inc.

23. ECSE 500 • Of course speakers of a language constantly use these components of language together, and usually in social situations. • In the next class session we will add a fourth component: pragmatics, which deals with rules of language use.