The acquisition of syntax by children
Contributing author: Athina Ntalli
This blog post was written for teachers and parents interested in children’s acquisition of syntax. The author considered multiple approaches to language acquisition research and tried to give an as comprehensive representation of the findings as is possible in a short blog post.
Introduction
Language is a unique human characteristic. Despite all of us speaking (or signing in) a language, we still get awed by how children learn a language - miraculously fast and effortlessly. We realise better what an accomplishment this is when we start learning an additional language at any point after childhood and we then normally need to spend a lot of time practising to get better.
In this blog post, we will focus on the development of one aspect of language, that is syntax, and discuss the first steps of syntactic development in children’s first language(s) focusing on production. When we talk about syntax, in simple terms, we refer to the rules of how words can be combined to form sentences. English native speakers, for example, know that the sentence ‘The cat chased the mouse.’ does not have an equivalent meaning with the sentence ‘The mouse chased the cat.’. They further know that the sentence ‘Chased the cat the mouse.’ is ungrammatical. So all native speakers of English know how to put these words together to communicate the intended meaning. Syntax then is the system of rules governing the ordering of words to form grammatical sentences.
Children go through stages in the development of their mother tongue syntax [1, 2]. Taking English as a language to discuss—because we have more child data than for any other language—monolingual English children start producing single words (e.g., ‘Ball.’) at around 12-18 months. They will subsequently (around 18-24 months) turn to the two-word stage, when combinations of two words are used, as in ‘Want ball.’. This may be considered the first stage of production of syntax. This will be followed by multi-word utterances or the ‘telegraphic speech’ stage, which is the phase when children start using larger units which may still not be fully grammatical (usually between 24-36 months) [3].
An English-speaking child, between the ages of two and three years, might say ‘John want ball.’ or ‘Me want ball.’. In the first case, ‘John want ball.’, the verb want is incorrect according to the adult native speaker of English. In English, the verb needs to be marked with -s when the subject is in third person singular and in the present tense. Further, subjects need to be in the nominative case, so ‘Me want ball.’ should be ‘I want the ball.’. Despite these errors though, we should note that the child has correctly ordered the words of their language. The word order in simple sentences by monolingual children is generally remarkably accurate.
Language development proceeds very rapidly for children overcoming the telegraphic speech stage. By age 4, typically developing children will, by and large, have mastered basic syntactic operations such as subject-verb agreement in third person singular in the present tense as in ‘She plays basketball on Sundays.’, and subjects will be in nominative case such as ‘I want that.’). Children will also have started building sentences with a growing variety of structures. These may include structures such as questions starting with words such as who, which, or what (e.g., ‘Who is Sofia’s friend?’) and subsequently passives (e.g., ‘My purse was stolen by Sam.’).
Another example of the stages monolingual English children go through is in the acquisition of negation. A sentence with a negation is, ‘John does not want the ball.’. Children have been found to go first through a stage where they use a single word to mark negation using ‘no’ or ‘not’, as in ‘No mommy eat’. They then start using negative markers in the right order, that is clause-internally (after the subject and before the verb), but without necessarily being fully grammatical, as in ‘She no want this.’. In the final stage, the child can correctly use negation as it would be used in adult English speech, as in ‘I don’t want to come.’.
As shown in this example of monolingual development in English, listening to what children say shows us that they gradually reach mastery of different simple sentence structures by around age 4.
Individual differences
Although children acquire sentence structures following the same trajectory, not all children will proceed on this trajectory at the same speed. For instance, thinking of two-year-olds, one child might only be producing two-word utterances, whereas another child may already be producing three- (or more) word utterances; or taking again the example of negation, a child may produce it fully correctly when another child may still make errors.
Individual differences in the development of syntax knowledge (also called syntactic knowledge) have been suggested to be due to various factors such as the quantity and quality of the language the child is exposed to. Individual differences may also be explained as being due to ‘developmental cascades’, which refer to the consequences of an event or change to the child’s life which may then have knock-on effects on other aspects of child development [4].
Within the area of language development, there is consensus among researchers that individual differences are pronounced in vocabulary development. There is, however, disagreement among researchers as to how important or pronounced these are when we consider the learning of simple sentence structures.
Bilingual/Multilingual (first) language acquisition
We focused so far on monolingual English learners because it is the population that has been researched more extensively. Research with simultaneous bilingual children, that is, children exposed to two languages from birth, or very soon after, show that they acquire sentence structures similarly to monolingual children. Bilingual children typically proceed through the same trajectory of acquisition as monolingual children, but in some cases with a different speed. For instance, a bilingual child may start producing two-word utterances in one of their languages at a later age than a monolingual child. Qualitative differences have also been attested although to a lesser extent. An example comes from a study looking at Chinese-English bilingual children [5]. This study found that the children go through a stage of using the Chinese word order in questions they form in English: instead of ‘What is this?’, they may say ‘This is what?’. This example illustrates that in bilingual acquisition, one language may influence the learning of another.
To conclude, language development in children learning more than one language can be similar to that of monolinguals but there are more factors to consider. Examples of factors include how often the two languages are used by the child, what is the cross-linguistic influence (i.e., how one language influences the other), and the quantity and quality of input a child is exposed to (i.e. how much and how rich is the language) [6]. We do not understand many aspects of multilingual language development. More research is needed particularly with children acquiring more than two languages, but the evidence so far supports the idea that multilingual children also acquire sentence structures in a similar way as monolingual children do.
Conclusions
The key message for the parent, caregiver and teacher is that the acquisition of syntax/sentence structures by typically developing children proceeds through the same steps and stages. Knowing more about the trajectory children go through may help us understand better their development and what we may expect at each age even while keeping in mind that individual differences do exist to some extent. Finally, multilingual children, even with the many languages they are learning, (probably) produce sentence structures as monolinguals do but there may be quantitative and perhaps also some qualitative differences that we are yet to systematically research.
About the Author
Athina Ntalli is a post-doctoral researcher working at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, for the TalkTogether project. She completed her PhD in Second Language Acquisition at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include child language acquisition and the factors that shape it.
References
[1] Hyams, N. & Orfitelli, R. (2017). The Acquisition of Syntax. In E.M. Fernández and H.S. Cairns (eds.), The Handbook of Psycholinguistics, 593- 614. Wiley/Blackwell Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118829516.ch26
[2] Thornton, R. (2016). Children’s Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.72
[3] O’Grady, W. (2000). Acquisition of Syntax. In P. Hogan (Ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language Sciences, 828-31. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
[4] Kidd, E., Bidgood, A., Donnely, S., Durrant, S., Peter, M. S., & Rowland, C. F. (2020). Individual differences in first language acquisition and their theoretical implications. In C. F. Rowland, A. L. Theakston, B. Ambridge & K. E. Twomey (Eds.), Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How Children Use their Environment to Learn, 189-219. Amsterdam; Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.27.09kid
[5] Yip, V., & Matthews, S. (2007). The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511620744
[6] Unsworth, S. (2013). Current issues in multilingual first language acquisition. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 33, 21-50. doi:10.1017/S0267190513000044
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