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Syntactic Development

Article in Language · March 2000

DOI: 10.2307/417403 · Source: OAI

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In P. Hogan (ed.). The Cambridge encyclopedia of language sciences, 828-31. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.

ACQUISITION OF SYNTAX (William OʼGrady)

For the past several decades, research on the acquisition of syntax has focused
on two related and partially overlapping themes, one involving LEARNABILITY
(see also UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR and EMERGENTISM) and the other having to
do with development. The study of learnability (also known as the “logical
problem of language acquisition”) seeks to identify the cognitive structures that
are required to construct a language in response to the particular types of
experience available in the first years of life. In contrast, the study of
development, on which this essay focuses, investigates the emergence of syntactic
categories and patterns, with special attention to the types of errors and
intermediate stages that precede full mastery of a language.

Early Development
As a first approximation, it is common to divide the course of early syntactic
development into three periods or phases (sometimes called ‘stages’).
Traditionally, these periods are characterized by successive milestones—the
appearance of single-word utterances (around 12 to 18 months), the productive
use of two-word combinations (beginning around 18 to 24 months), and the
emergence of longer multi-word utterances (24 to 30 months) that initially lack
certain affixes and functional categories, often referred to as “telegraphic speech.”
(It must be acknowledged, however, that this categorization is less appropriate for
languages such as Mohawk (Mithun 1989) and Quiché Mayan (Pye 1983), whose
words often include layers of affixes, at least some of which show up even in
early utterances, especially when they occur in stressed syllables.

The One-Word Stage. Many of children’s one-word utterances express a

sentence-like meaning and are therefore HOLOPHRASTIC—thus Dada might
mean “There’s Daddy,” ball could mean “I want the ball,” and so forth. A notable
feature of these utterances is an orientation to informativeness: children utter the
word that best expresses what is new or changing or uncertain about the situation,
leaving it to their interlocutors to fill in the details and respond in an appropriate
way.
Comprehension appears to be considerably in advance of production in the
one-word stage, and there is evidence that children can interpret agent-action-
patient sentences during this period, even when this requires the use of word order
cues. As shown by Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1996:107ff), for instance, 16- to
19-month olds who produce limited or no two-word speech nonetheless prefer to
look at a depiction of Big Bird hugging Cookie Monster rather than the reverse
situation when they hear the sentence Big Bird is hugging Cookie Monster.
 2

The Two-Word Stage. Many of children’s utterances in the TWO-WORD

STAGE show evidence of item-based learning, instantiating primitive
grammatical frames that are organized around a particular word.

(1) see boy more cereal allgone shoe

see sock more cookie allgone egg
see you more fish allgone watch

Over time, some of these frames become productive, permitting the substitution
of other words of the appropriate type and eventually taking on the morphological
and syntactic properties typical of the adult language. Tomasello (2003) suggests
that the formation of abstract constructions from word-based patterns in this
manner is the driving force behind syntactic development.

The Telegraphic Stage. The transition to sentences containing three or more

words, often around the age of 24 months, can be rapid—it is not unusual to see
the proportion of these longer utterances increase from less than 15% of a child’s
total output to more than 50% in the space of just a few weeks. Conspicuously
absent from these otherwise quite sophisticated sentences in many languages are
morphemes and words that carry “grammatical information”—past tense markers,
copula and auxiliary verbs, affixes indicating number and case, definite and
indefinite articles, and so forth.

(2) Adam see that. Give doggie paper.

Put truck window. Kitty go home?
Sit Adam chair. Play momma slipper.

In languages where an uninflected form is not a possible word, strategies other

than affix-dropping are adopted, including the overuse of certain inflected forms,
such as infinitives or imperatives for verbs (e.g., Berman 1985:268 for Hebrew)
and the nominative case for nouns (e.g., Imedadze and Tuite 1992:77 for
Georgian).
Language learners seem to be aware of functional categories and inflection
well before they employ them consistently themselves. Children as young as 17
months can infer from the presence or absence of a determiner whether a novel
word (a zav versus Zav, used to refer to a doll) is a type-denoting common noun
or an individual-denoting proper name (Katz et al. 1974). Eighteen-month-olds
listen longer to a passage containing an is + V-ing pattern than to one containing
can + V-ing (Santelmann and Jusczyk 1998). And infants as young as eleven
 3

months of age are surprised when a or the is replaced by a nonsense syllable, or

when it is used in the wrong place, as in book the (Shafer et al. 1998).
There are important commonalities across children in the emergence of the
grammatical morphemes that are absent during the telegraphic stage: -ing comes
to be used correctly 90% of the time in obligatory contexts before be does, the and
a attain this level still later, and the verbal agreement suffix -s proves to be
particularly slow. As noted by Brown (1973), the factors implicated in these
developmental sequences include morphological regularity, frequency of
occurrence, perceptual salience, and semantic transparency.

Later Development
The length and complexity of children’s utterances increase rapidly once
telegraphic speech begins, and a wide range of structures and phenomena make
their appearance in a matter of months. A brief but representative survey of these
later developments is in order. (For reasons of space, I focus primarily on
English.)

Negation. Children’s earliest negation patterns are built around a preverbal no or

not. (Presubject negation, as in No the door open, occurs only occasionally.)

(3) No have it, Mommy.

She not going.

Negation assumes its standard syntax only after the emergence of auxiliary and
copular verbs (I don’t have it, She isn’t going).
Negatives interact with verbal inflection in an intriguing way during the “root
infinitive stage”—a period around age 2 in which marking for tense and
agreement is optional. As Wexler (1996) observes, the pattern of preverbal
negation exemplified in (3) is apparently limited to non-finite verb forms—
children do not say She not goes.
A parallel contrast can be observed in French, which places the negator pas
after a finite verb (Il ne voyage pas ‘He travels not’) but before an infinitive (ne
pas voyager ‘to not travel’). Children respect this distinction from the outset,
using post-verbal negation with finite verbs (est pas mort ‘is not dead’) and pre-
verbal negation with non-finite verb forms (pas casser ‘not break-Inf’).

Pro-drop—a case of parameter setting? A salient feature of children’s early

multi-word utterances is the frequent absence of subjects (no turn, helping
Mommy). Researchers were quick to note that these patterns bear a resemblance to
the sorts of sentences found in “pro(noun)-drop” languages such as Italian and
 4

Chinese, which differ from English in having the “plus” setting of the pro-drop
parameter of Universal Grammar. This in turn led to the suggestion that early
parameter settings might be incorrect, and that children initially believe that
English permits null subjects (e.g., Hyams and Wexler 1993).
This now seems unlikely, though, since there is evidence that English-
speaking children drop subjects significantly less often than do children learning
languages such as Italian and Chinese (e.g., Valian 1991). This finding paved the
way for the proposal that subject drop in English takes place in response to
processing limitations, reflecting performance factors rather than a mistaken
parameter setting (e.g., Bloom 1990). However, this hypothesis leaves
unaddressed a correlation between pro-drop and finiteness that is especially
evident in wh questions, where null subjects seem to occur almost exclusively
with root infinitives (Bromberg & Wexler 1995). Thus one finds questions such
as Where go?, but not *Where goes?

Inversion in wh questions. An early observation in research on child language

was that subject-auxiliary inversion often fails to take place in wh questions,
despite its systematic use in yes-no questions (Klima & Bellugi 1966).

(4) a. What he can ride in?

b. Can I have candy?

Subsequent work revealed that the tendency was particularly widespread in why
questions (Why that boy is looking at us?).
The explanations proposed to account for this fact illustrate the theoretical
diversity of acquisition research. On the one hand, Rowland and Pine (2000)
argue for an input-based explanation, noting that inverted why questions occur
relatively infrequently in the input. On the other hand, Crain, Goro and Thornton
(2006) suggest that the contrast between why and other wh words duplicates a
parametric option found in Italian and made available via Universal Grammar to
children learning English: why can be located either in the normal position for a
fronted wh word (in the specifier position of CP), in which case inversion takes
place, or in a higher position, in which case there is no inversion.

Passives. It has been known for decades that English passive patterns (e.g.,
The cat was chased by the dog) are mastered later than their active counterparts
(The dog chased the cat), both in comprehension and production, with errors often
lasting until age 6 or later. In addition, it has been observed that both the type of
verb and the presence of a by-phrase have an impact—passives involving action-
denoting verbs such as push are more easily interpreted than those involving
 5

experience-denoting verbs such as see, and “agentless” passives are easier than
those with a by-phrase. (See O’Grady 1997:192ff for a review.)
The difficulty of passives has been attributed to a variety of factors, including
their relative infrequency in the input, the fact that they depart from the canonical
mapping between thematic roles and grammatical relations (the agent is not the
subject), and the possibility that the operation that converts direct objects into
subjects matures late and is therefore not available in the early stages of
acquisition (e.g., Wexler 1999).
In recent years, our understanding of the status of passives in child language
has been significantly enhanced by the study of its acquisition in other languages.
Particularly intriguing in this regard is the finding that the passive is used
productively prior to age 3 in Sesotho (Demuth 1989) and Quiché Mayan (Pye
and Poz 1988), where its frequency of occurrence is apparently higher than in
English. However, the precise consequences of this finding remain a matter of
some dispute because of the possibility that the passive in these languages may be
formed by mechanisms different from those underlying the English-type passive
(Wexler 1999).

Pronoun Interpretation. Yet another area of productive research focuses on

children’s interpretation of pronouns.

(5) a. Goldilocks tickled herself.

b. Goldilocks tickled her.

Numerous studies report that children aged 6 and younger frequently select
Goldilocks as the antecedent for her, as well as for herself, in these sentences.
This is sometimes attributed to a processing-related locality effect (an antecedent
in the same clause is more accessible; e.g., O’Grady 2005:166ff).
Chien and Wexler (1990) report that children who err in their interpretation of
(5b) respond correctly to sentences such as (6).

(6) Everyone tickled her.

Some scholars, including Chien and Wexler, propose that two separate principles
of Universal Grammar are at stake in sentences such as (5) and (6), where the
potential antecedent is structurally higher than (i.e., “c-commands”) the pronoun.
On the one hand, Principle I rules out coreference with a referring NP such as
Goldilocks where the resulting interpretation is not distinct from the one
associated with a reflexive pronoun. On the other hand, Principle B prohibits a
referential dependency on a quantified NP such as everyone (so-called “binding”).
 6

The key idea is that whereas children exhibit early mastery of Principle B
(hence their success on sentences such as (6)), Principle I creates difficulties,
perhaps because its implementation requires greater processing resources
(Grodzinsky and Reinhart 1993).
This is an intriguing possibility, but recent research has raised doubts about
the authenticity of the asymmetry between quantified and referring antecedents.
Especially notable is the work of Elbourne (2005), who suggests that the contrast
between the two types of antecedent is, in effect, a methodological artifact, and
that referring NPs have more salient referents than do quantified NPs in many of
the contexts and sentences used to investigate pronoun interpretation.

Relative Clauses. The development of relative clauses has long been central to
research on the acquisition of syntax, both because the construction has intricate
syntactic features (non-canonical word order, gaps, relative pronouns) and
because there are tantalizing hints of a relationship between development and
typology. As noted by various scholars, there is some indication that the difficulty
of relative clauses in the course of acquisition is determined by the status of the
gap with respect to the familiar hierarchy of typological markedness: Subj > Dir
Obj > Ind Obj > … Thus a subject gap relative clause such as the car [that _
bumped the truck] is easier than a direct object gap relative such as the car [that
the truck bumped _]. Work by Diessel and Tomasello (2005) casts doubt on the
generality of these parallels, but the question is still open to debate.

Conclusion
Although the acquisition of syntax takes places over a multi-year period, there
is widespread agreement that the basic sentence-formation system is essentially in
place by age four, if not earlier, even in the case of languages such as
Greendlandic and Georgian that are known for their highly intricate
morphosyntax (Fortescue, and Olsen 1992, Imadadze and Tuite 1992). Although
the matter is far from settled, late development may be largely devoted to
mastering idiosyncrasies associated with individual lexical items, acquiring a
fuller competence in pragmatic matters, and overcoming frequency effects and
processing limitations that degrade performance on certain patterns.
Children’s acquisition of syntax, whose complexity continues to baffle
professional linguists, is a remarkable achievement—made even more so by the
spontaneity, rapidity and uniform success that are typical under normal
circumstances. Syntactic development and the mysteries surrounding it rightly
occupy a central place in linguistics and cognitive science. The years ahead hold
the promise of further progress, as research is extended to an even broader range
of languages and phenomena.
 7

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Kamil Deen, Kevin Gregg, Patrick Hogan, and an

anonymous referee for helpful comments.

Works Cited and Suggestions for Further Reading

Berman, Ruth. 1985. “The Acquisition of Hebrew.” In The Crosslinguistic Study of

Language Acquisition. Volume 1: The Data, ed. D. Slobin, 255-371. Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Bloom, Paul. 1990. “Subjectless Sentences in Child Language.” Linguistic Inquiry 21:
491-504.
Bromberg, Hilary and Kenneth Wexler. 1995. “Null Subjects in Child Wh- Questions.”
MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 26: 221-47.
Brown, Roger. 1973. A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press. The pioneering work on early syntactic development.
Chien, Yu-Chin and Kenneth Wexler. 1990. “Children’s Knowledge of Locality
Conditions in Binding as Evidence for the Modularity of Syntax and Semantics.”
Language Acquisition 1: 225-95.
Crain, Stephen, Takuya Goro, and Rosalind Thornton. 2006. “Language Acquisition is
Language Change.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 35: 31-49. A clear and
insightful statement of language acquisition from the perspective of Universal
Grammar.
Demuth, Catherine. 1989. “Maturation and the Acquisition of the Sesotho Passive.”
Language 65: 56-80.
Diessel, Holger and Michael Tomasello. 2005. “A New Look at the Acquisition of
Relative Clauses.” Language 81: 882-906.
Elbourne, Paul. 2005. “On the Acquisition of Principle B.” Linguistic Inquiry 36: 333-65.
An excellent illustration of how methodology can shape experimental findings.
Fortescue, Michael and Lise Olsen. 1992. “The Acquisition of West Greenlandic.” In The
Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition. Volume 3, ed. D. Slobin, 111-
219. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Grodzinsky, Yosef and Tanya Reinhard. 1993. “The Innateness of Binding and Co-
reference.” Linguistic Inquiry 24: 69-102.
Hirsh-Pasek, Kathryn and Roberta Golinkoff. 1996. The Origins of Grammar: Evidence
from Early Language Comprehension. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. An
important study of early syntactic development.
Hyams, Nina and Kenneth Wexler. 1993. “On the Grammatical Basis of Null Subjects in
Child Language.” Linguistic Inquiry 24: 421-59.
Imadadze, Natela and Kevin Tuite. 1992. “The Acquisition of Georgian.” The
Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition. Volume 3, ed. D. Slobin, 39-109.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Katz, Nancy, Erica Baker and John Macnamara 1974. “What’s in a Name: A Study of
How Children Learn Common and Proper Names.” Child Development 45: 469-
73.
Klima, Edward and Ursula Bellugi. 1966. “Syntactic Regularities in the Speech of
Children.” Psycholinguistic Papers, ed. J. Lyons and R. Wales, 183-208.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Mithun, Marianne. 1989. The acquisition of polysynthesis. Journal of Child Language
16: 285-312.
O’Grady, William. 1997. Syntactic Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
A phenomenon-by-phenomenon survey of the acquisition of syntax.
 8

O’Grady, William. 2005. Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax.

Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Pye, Clifton. 1983. “Mayan telegraphese.” Language 59, 583-604.
Pye, Clifton and Pedro Poz. 1988. “Precocious Passives (and Antipassives) in Quiché
Mayan.” Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 27: 71-80.
Rowland, Caroline and Julian Pine. 2000. “Subject-Auxiliary Inversion Errors and Wh-
question Acquisition: ‘What Children Do Know?’” Journal of Child Language
27: 157-82. A good illustration of input-oriented acquisition research.
Santelmann, Lynn and Peter Jusczyk. 1998. “Sensitivity to Discontinuous Dependencies
in Language Learners: Evidence for Limitations in Processing Space.” Cognition
69: 105-34.
Shafer, Valerie, David Shucard, Janet Shucard and LouAnn Gerken. 1998. “An
Electrophysiological Study of Infants’ Sensitivity to English Function
Morphemes.” Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 41: 874-86.
Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of
Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The most
comprehensive statement to date of a construction-based approach to syntactic
development.
Valian, Virginia. 1991. Syntactic Subjects in the Early Speech of American and Italian
Children. Cognition 40:21-81.
Wexler, Kenneth. 1996. “The Development of Inflection in a Biologically Based Theory
of Language Acquisition.” In Towards a Genetics of Language, ed. M. Rice,
113-44. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. An accessible introduction to the cluster of
phenomena associated with the optional infinitive stage.
Wexler, Kenneth. 1999. “Maturation and Growth of Grammar.” In Handbook of
Language Acquisition, ed. W. Ritchie and T. Bhatia, 55-109. San Diego:
Academic Press.

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